Joe Biden officially has a Hunter Biden problem

More charges.

(Hunter Biden and Joe Biden)

On Thursday, Hunter Biden, the son of the president of the United States, was charged with “a scheme to evade federal taxes on millions in income from foreign businesses.”

At issue is a four-year period — between 2016 and 2019 — in which prosecutors allege that Hunter Biden purposely worked to avoid paying $1.4 million in federal taxes.

“Between 2016 and Oct. 15, 2020, the defendant spent this money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes,” wrote David Weiss, the special counsel tasked with looking into Hunter Biden earlier this year.

Oomph.

It’s the second indictment for Hunter in 2023. He was previously charged in Delaware on the illegal purchase of a handgun.

This is a problem for Joe Biden. And the New York Times explains why:

The charges, while serious, were far less explosive than ones pushed by former President Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans, who have been angry with the department for failing to find wider criminal wrongdoing by the president’s son and family.

But the failure of Mr. Biden’s lawyers to reach a new settlement after talks with Mr. Weiss fell apart has now subjected Mr. Biden to the perils of two criminal proceedings in two jurisdictions, with unpredictable outcomes.

Now, before I go any further, let me establish a few things.

1. Nowhere in the Hunter Biden indictments is there anything that even suggests that Joe Biden is involved in this stuff in any way.

2. Donald Trump — the actual person who is the frontrunner to be the Republican presidential nominee — faces four indictments and 91 counts of wrongdoing.

3. Numbers 1 and 2 are NOT equal.

Ok. Let me urge you to go back and read those three points again before you a) read the rest of the piece or b) yell at me in the comments section.

Despite those three things, the ongoing legal issues of Hunter Biden DO complicate what Joe Biden needs to do in order to win in 2024.

And that is: Paint this race as between corruption/double dealing/personal enrichment and, well, not that.

I’ve argued in this space that Biden’s best attribute in the race is that, in the main, swing voters believe that he is a fundamentally decent human who tries (if not always succeeds) to do the right thing.

As I wrote in that piece:

The reality is that for all of the talk of Hunter Biden and other allegations of wrongdoing by the Biden family, the average swing voters simply does not believe that Joe Biden is a scheming bad guy.

They may well think he is too old — or even incompetent. But they think that, at his core, he is trying to do what he believes to be the right thing for the American people.

Which I think has been true!

But, I also think that these latest charges, which are far more serious than the gun ones (the issue there is that Hunter bought a gun while he was knowingly doing drugs), threaten to hand Republicans a way to tarnish that hail-fellow-well-met reputation of Biden’s.

Why? I think Damon Linker, who writes the terrific “Notes from the Middleground” Substack (subscribe!), explained it far better than I could. In an email exchange with me earlier this year — before Hunter had been charged with anything — Damon wrote:

That drip of insinuation and circumstantial evidence has continued, while the president himself has done nothing to separate himself from his son, who still visits the White House and has even attended a state dinner within the last couple of months. That seems reckless to me.

During the final season of The West Wing, the communications director for the Bartlet administration gets himself embroiled in a major scandal, and the White House Counsel makes the case for summarily firing him on the grounds that he has become “toxic to the presidency.” I think we’ve arrived at the moment when Hunter Biden could well be toxic to the Biden presidency — even if no direct foreign payments to Joe Biden are even revealed, and even if no direct quid pro quo is ever substantiated. 

That’s because enough has already been revealed to suggest Joe Biden either knew what his son was doing — enriching himself through outright influence peddling to foreign actors — and went along with it, or that he should have known and didn’t because he turned a blind eye to it.

I fear that either would be more than enough to undermine one of Biden’s strongest messages in a general-election rematch with Donald Trump in 2024. In 2020, Biden portrayed himself as a decent, normie American who would save the country from the chaos and corruption of the Trump administration and family. But if Republicans can demonstrate that Biden is actually not all that much better than Trump, then we have a 2016 scenario unfolding all over again, with “Crooked Joe” standing in for “Crooked Hillary.” Trump won’t have to make the second shoe drop. He’ll just have to describe a situation that looks sordid in order to convince a meaningful number of voters that both candidates are sleazy. That’s how Trump could win — by sending Biden’s negatives high enough that the two major-party nominees seem equally bad in the eyes of enough swing-state voters to make a decisive difference in November 2024.

Again (taps the sign) I am not saying that the charges against Hunter Biden = the charges against Donald Trump. (Neither is Damon.) They do not.

But, what I am saying is that politics is not a court of law. Donald Trump doesn’t need to prove that Joe Biden is knee deep in Hunter Biden’s problems (whether we are talking about the indictments or the allegations of influence peddling.) All he needs to do is muddy the water enough that, to Damon’s point above, some chunk of voters in some swing states effectively throw their hands up and say something like “All politicians are corrupt!”

That is a MAJOR win for Trump. Because it cancels out (or, at least, somewhat neutralizes) his biggest problem in the race which is, just to repeat, that he currently faces FOUR indictments and NINETY-ONE total charges.

Should this be the case? No. In an ideal world, people educate themselves about what is being alleged in each of the cases. They conclude that — at least so far — there is no tie between Hunter and Joe Biden. And that Trump’s charges — especially the ones about the whole trying-to-overturn-a-free-and-fair-election thing — are more serious, with more wide and long lasting implications to a healthy democracy.

But we don’t live in that world. As much as the media will do to make clear the differences in the charges — both in what is alleged and its magnitude — the Republican noise machine (led by Fox News) will do the opposite, suggesting that it is actually Hunter Biden’s problems that are far worse.

Even before the latest charges against Hunter, Fox News was heavily invested in covering him. As Axios wrote earlier this fall:

Fox News has covered Hunter Biden significantly more than CNN and MSNBC during the past year, according to new data that shed light on how news networks' emphasis of certain storylines shape what viewers see…

…Fox News, which includes conservative hosts alongside reporters, also has covered Hunter Biden twice as much as it's covered presidential candidate Ron DeSantis in the past year, according to an analysis of data pulled from the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer.

And then Trump himself — as well as his campaign apparatus — pick up on the reports, and use them to suggest that Biden (Joe, that is) is deeply corrupt.

“Biden is the most corrupt president in American history—and that’s not even close,” Trump said in a statement when Biden announced his reelection bid in the spring. “Nobody can believe what’s going on, with again no retribution whatsoever.”

He’s installed that “most corrupt” line into his stump speech, delivering without fail every time he is campaigning.

The question, of course, is not whether Trump’s base believes it. They do. But they weren’t ever going to vote for Biden anyway. So, no harm done.

The real question is how much all of this smoke surrounding Hunter seeps under the doors of the swing voters in swing states. And there is some evidence that people — or at least some decent-sized chunk of them — do see some not-great stuff in all of this for Biden.

Check out this finding from an AP-NORC poll conducted in October:

Doing a bit of quick math, almost 7 in 10 Americans believe Biden did something “illegal” (35%) or “unethical” (33%) in relation to Hunter’s business dealings.

Joe Biden has said, repeatedly, that he loves his son and is proud of him. And that he isn’t going to say much else.

I am not sure that will work. Because Republicans are going to say a WHOLE lot of things about Hunter Biden. And a negative attack unanswered tends to be a negative attack believed.

Plus, there is some there there when it comes to Hunter Biden. This isn’t just House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s wild goose chase. This is a special counsel saying Hunter purposely didn’t pay his taxes and instead used that money on escorts and luxury cars.

Silence in the face of those facts may be an untenable strategy now.