Exclusive — Stefanik: ‘If Your Last Name Is Biden’ You Get to Live by Separate Rules

House GOP Conference chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) joined a chorus of Republicans outraged on Tuesday by news of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter reaching a plea deal with federal prosecutors, saying the younger Biden had received special treatment because of his family ties.

“The fact that you have the president’s son getting away with tax fraud, illegal bribery, corrupt pay-to-play illegal gun purchases, as well as not paying adequate child support — that is fundamentally unfair in this justice system, that if your last name is Biden, you get to live by a separate set of rules,” Stefanik told Breitbart News in an interview.

Stefanik, a member of leadership who sits on the House’s weaponization of the federal government panel, spoke just a couple hours after court filings revealed Hunter had pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges of willful failure to pay federal income tax.

Hunter also faces a felony charge for possessing a firearm while illegally using or being addicted to drugs, but that charge is expected to be dropped after a probationary period, according to the court paperwork, filed by U.S. Attorney David Weiss.

Hunter’s plea deal, which several Republicans denounced as a “sweetheart deal,” comes as the GOP is continuing to probe the younger Biden’s foreign business dealings and what involvement his father may have had in them.

The House Oversight Committee, which is heading up the congressional probe into the Biden family, said in a statement Hunter’s plea deal would have “no impact” on the committee’s ongoing investigation as it continues to uncover what it describes as “growing evidence … the Bidens engaged in a pattern of corruption, influence peddling, and possibly bribery.”

Much of the initial information leading to these allegations stemmed from emails found on Hunter’s laptop, which he abandoned in a repair shop in 2019 and which the FBI later subpoenaed. The emails were first reported by now-Breitbart News Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris in the New York Post a couple weeks before the 2020 election.

The weaponization committee, of which Stefanik is a member, is also investigating aspects of the Justice Department’s work, including its dual special counsel probes into former President Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the matter of classified documents. The former probe resulted in a historic 37-count indictment of Trump while the latter remains pending.

The Biden administration’s Justice Department criminally charging Biden’s leading 2024 Republican opponent has drawn fury from many Republicans in Congress, including Stefanik, who says the prosecution against Trump amounts to “election meddling.”

“This is a slap on [Hunter’s] wrist from the politicized and weaponized Department of Justice. … This is the same Department of Justice that’s going after Joe Biden’s top political opponent going into the election, so that is a form of election meddling by the Department of Justice, and we need to make sure from Congress’s respect that we continue to do our investigative and oversight work of these agencies, rein them in, root out the rot so this politicization is stopped at all levels.”