This week, two House committees formally recommended holding Joe Biden’s scandal-plagued son, Hunter Biden, in contempt of Congress for denying two congressional subpoenas. The contempt resolution will soon go before the whole House for a vote.
In 2022, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the partisan January 6 Committee and was subsequently prosecuted, found guilty, and sentenced to four months in prison.
It would be up to the Biden Justice Department to prosecute the contempt charges, which could result in jail time. This would put the Biden administration in a dicey position where it would have to decide whether to refuse to enforce the law to protect Joe’s son or actually prosecute him.
Neither option is ideal. Refusing to prosecute Hunter for violating a congressional subpoena will reinforce Republican allegations of a two-tiered justice system protecting the well-connected Bidens. But prosecuting Hunter in the middle of the presidential campaign season and having him potentially serve jail time isn’t exactly politically ideal for Joe Biden either.
So Hunter’s legal team is asking for a mulligan.
In a letter to both the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said that if a new subpoena is issued, Hunter Biden will comply with it.
Previously, Biden’s legal team claimed that Hunter would only testify in a public hearing in an attempt to dictate the terms of his deposition. Hunter's legal team has suddenly decided to claim that those subpoenas were “legally invalid” because they preceded the formalization of the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.
Rather than accepting Mr. Biden’s offer to voluntarily sit for a public hearing, you are now seeking to have the full House find him in contempt based on subpoenas for a deposition that you issued on November 8 and 9, 2023. I write to make you aware (if you are not already) that your subpoenas were and are legally invalid and cannot form a legal basis to proceed with your misdirected and impermissible contempt resolution. And you two, of all people, should know that is the case.
As you recount in your contempt reports, in 2019, when the Democrats held the majority, they similarly issued impeachment subpoenas before the impeachment inquiry of former President Trump was authorized by a full House vote. The basis at that time was then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s September 24, 2019, statement that “the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry” into then President Trump’s conduct and that she was directing committees to proceed to obtain information for that purpose. You even cited Speaker Pelosi as precedent for your latest actions.
"If you issue a new proper subpoena, now that there is a duly authorized impeachment inquiry, Mr. Biden will comply for a hearing or deposition. We will accept such a subpoena on Mr. Biden’s behalf,” Lowell wrote.
Lowell’s reasoning here is absurd, of course. Nancy Pelosi never had a full House vote to formalize the 2019 impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump.
So what’s this all about? Hunter’s legal team was likely not expecting the committees to recommend contempt charges, and since the House did vote to formalize the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, there’s little reason to believe that Hunter won’t be found in contempt of Congress. This puts the Biden administration in the situation I explained above: prosecute or not, with neither option making Biden look very good. This is why Hunter’s team is essentially caving.
The question is: will Republicans fall for this?
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