Who could have ever imagined that Hunter Biden would plead guilty to federal income-tax-evasion charges before bust-out ex-state senator Dean Tran?
But that’s exactly what has happened — the president’s crackhead bagman son is now awaiting his inevitable pardon.
Meanwhile, Tran, a failed member of the state GOP’s Kool Aid Kult, is taking commuter rail in from Fitchburg every morning for his trial in federal court in Boston. The charges against him include 28 counts of wire fraud and income-tax evasion.
A crooked, thieving pol — what else is new, you ask?
But what’s very unusual about this case is that Tran has been filing nightly updates on his trial on Facebook, denouncing the feds and claiming that he is, you guessed it, a victim.
He’s a Republican.
He “once worked for the government, at one of its highest levels as a state senator.”
He’s a minority (Vietnamese immigrant).
No one has been covering the trial since opening arguments last Tuesday, so we must rely on Tran’s own accounts. And he says the feds have complained to Judge Saylor about his new career as courtroom correspondent, “disparaging” the prosecutors.
Friday night, Tran posted:
“To show respect for the judge, I will tone down my language as much as I can with civility and professionalism, considering these people have destroyed my life.”
Senator, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
To recap, Tran was briefly a state senator from Fitchburg, losing his seat in 2020. Like most legislators, he was utterly unemployable. He soon discovered that he was not eligible for state unemployment. He applied for “hundreds of jobs,” as he told the Globe Monday night before the trial began.
Of course no one wanted to hire him. So he decided to run a couple of grifts, or so say the feds in their voluminous indictments.
First, he applied for COVID welfare, eventually pocketing more than $30,000. While on welfare, he was employed as a $90-an-hour consultant by Rick Green, another failed Republican candidate who uses his company 1A Auto Parts as a sort of almshouse for dodgy, defeated GOP pols from the Kool Aid Kult. (Think Geoff “DoorDash” Diehl.)
While Green was paying him $55,000, Tran was simultaneously collecting $1,255 a week in handouts from the feds. So what, Tran says on Facebook.
“They alleged that I received $30 something thousand dollars in unemployment that I was not eligible for and didn’t pay a couple of thousand dollars in taxes. What do you think they would do to an ordinary person? Nothing!
“But because I am Dean Tran, a minority and a Republican with a successful record of winning elections, I must be dealt with.”
For the record, he last won an election in 2018. He lost his Senate seat in 2020 and was crushed in a run for Congress in 2022, although he did get a higher percentage of votes than DoorDash Diehl did in his catastrophic campaign for governor.
But wait, the feds say, there’s more. To try to qualify for state handouts, the feds say he forged a letter from his sister, who owns an Asian food company, claiming that she offered him a $120,000-a-year job, which he couldn’t accept because he was caring for his children during the school shutdowns.
His sister has since been indicted for lying to a grand jury. His former top aide at the State House, meanwhile, has also pleaded guilty in federal court to tax fraud and not paying $269,209 in taxes.
The feds also charge him with failing to report income from rental properties that he owns in Fitchburg.
And Sen. Tran has also been indicted on state charges relating to the theft of a firearm from an elderly constituent.
Do you begin to detect a pattern here?
His lawyer is Michael Walsh, who is sort of a house counsel to the bust-out remnants of the Kool Aid Kult. In the opening, Walsh did his best to explain the actions of his sticky-fingered client, saying he was “in a great panic” after being booted out of office.
“This is a guy who’s just trying to make ends meet,” Walsh whined. “Dean’s a little sloppy and a little careless, but those are mistakes.”
One of the prosecutors in Tran’s case is Dean Chao — “an Asian,” Tran sniffed on Facebook.
“Not a surprise since the entire gang is white. They had to least have a minority start the circus show for them so that the case against me is not about race. He was terrible!”
You know what really got Tran angry? That Chao used pejoratives like “stole” and “cheated” and “stealing is a crime.”
“I wanted to yell out, you want to talk about stealing, what about all the taxes and fees the government forced upon the everyday working person. This guy, Chao, his demeanor and personality are as arrogant as you can get, and boring as heck.”
Boring? Not at all, not when Chao was pointing out the tens of thousands of dollars Tran had been pocketing.
“Dean Tran reported none of that to the IRS,” Chao said. “Not one dollar!”
Hey, so what? What did Hunter Biden say after he copped his plea?
“Like millions of Americans, I failed to file and pay my taxes on time.”
Tran is obviously seething as he watches the G-men pile up the mountains of evidence against him. He rails against the “special” agents — “because they consider themselves to be Special.”
About a female fed he says, “This agent is beyond ‘special.’”
He describes another one as “a real piece of work.”
He notes that the tenants called as prosecution witnesses all said he was a good landlord. Dean, this isn’t a pageant for “Best Landlord of the Year.” The feds just wanted the jury to know that those tenants of yours paid rent — you know, the cash you forgot to report to the IRS.
Tran and his lawyer keep falling back on the same lame defenses Hunter Biden offered.
“What would happen to you,” Walsh asked the jury, “if one day the voters laid you off, and you’re a breadwinner with four kids and a wife?”
Or, as Hunter put it, “I wasn’t thinking about my taxes, I was thinking about surviving.”
I hope Tran keeps posting every evening. I enjoy his bombastic style. Here he describes the first day, and all the feds who showed up in his courtroom.
“It looked like a trial of a mob boss or serial killer. Fortunately, I did not puke.”
Don’t worry, Senator, you’ll have plenty of time for puking after the jury comes back with its verdict.