As Donald Trump prepares to head into a courtroom in his hush money trial, his congressional Republican allies are crafting a defense to present in the court of public opinion.
The former president will stand trial starting next week in the case involving his six-figure payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels weeks before the 2016 election, and a source told The Daily Beast that GOP lawmakers – including top House impeachment officials – will make allegations involving Hunter Biden a key part of their defense of Trump.
"While those accusations against Hunter Biden haven’t found much traction, that may soon change," wrote senior political reporter Roger Sollenberger.
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"From the day the indictment first dropped, Trump and his allies have invoked a ‘whatabout’ defense to counter the charges with accusations about the sitting president’s son," Sollenberger added. "In more recent months, they’ve been laying groundwork to equate tax payments that one of Hunter Biden’s lawyers, Kevin Morris, made on Hunter’s behalf with the hush money payments that Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, made on Trump’s behalf."
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Cohen, then Trump's personal attorney and friend, paid $130,000 to Daniels one week before the election to buy her silence about an alleged affair as the "Access Hollywood" tape threatened to destroy his campaign, and Cohen later pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges after telling the court that Trump had personally directed payments that amounted to an illegal in-kind campaign contribution.
A year after Cohen paid Daniels, then-president Trump reimbursed him in a series of checks amounting to $420,000 from the Trump Organization to account for income tax concerns and bonus pay, but Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg alleges that financial records on those payments were illegally falsified by the company.
On the other hand, Hunter Biden's personal attorney and friend Morris acknowledged in impeachment inquiry testimony to floating nearly $2 million in loans to his pal in 2020 to help him resolve tax issues, which Republicans insist was intended to benefit Joe Biden's campaign and therefore amounted to an illegal in-kind contribution, but an ethics expert says the two cases have little in common.
“A close personal friend of Hunter Biden’s helping him with unpaid taxes to relieve pressure he faced is not remotely the same thing as Donald Trump personally causing the Trump Org to create false business records in order to hide hush money payments,” said Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden had any involvement in his son's tax payment, and Bragg hasn't even charged Trump with any campaign finance violations.
“Based on what we know right now, this theory seems like a stretch," said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance law specialist and deputy executive director of watchdog Documented. "Hunter Biden wasn’t running for office, his personal tax issues were never an issue in his father’s campaign, and there is no evidence that Joe Biden directed or coordinated the tax payment."
By comparison, the hush money payments Cohen says Trump directed appear to have "a clear political nexus."
“With the Stormy Daniels payments, there was a clear enough electoral connection for Michael Cohen to plead guilty,” said Dan Weiner, a former attorney with the Federal Election Commission and director of elections and government at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.
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