Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to all nine criminal tax charges Thursday to avoid a potentially damaging trial that would have brought his lucrative foreign business dealings and lavish lifestyle back into the spotlight.
Judge Mark Scarsi announced Biden’s sentencing will take place on December 16, soon after the presidential election and the scheduled sentencing date for his federal gun conviction. The tax charges, three felonies, and six misdemeanors carry a maximum of 17 years in prison.
Defense attorney Abbe Lowell announced in the morning that Hunter Biden sought to reverse his not-guilty plea on the first day of jury selection for the tax trial. Hunter Biden initially offered to enter an “Alford plea” agreement where he would have maintained his innocence but accepted a sentence from Scarsi.
Federal prosecutors were confused by Hunter Biden’s Alford plea offer and urged Scarsi to reject it, noting that the government did not agree to the arrangement.
“Hunter Biden is not innocent. Hunter Biden is guilty,” said prosecutor Leo Wise.
Later on, Biden proposed a regular plea agreement without a deal with prosecutors. Inside the courthouse, he said that nobody pressured him into a plea deal or made any promises, CNN reported.
In a statement, Biden said he made the decision to avoid more pain for his family and criticized Justice Department prosecutors for “dehumanizing” him.
“I will not subject my family to more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment. For all I have put them through over the years, I can spare them this, and so I have decided to plead guilty,” Biden said.
Special counsel David Weiss is prosecuting Hunter Biden on nine federal tax charges based on his alleged failure to pay more than $1.4 million of taxes in a timely manner over a four-year period last decade. Along with tax evasion, Biden was charged with filing false tax returns for attempting to deduct expenses incurred from his drug-fueled escapades.
Most of Biden’s income from that time period came from foreign business dealings with individuals and entities in Ukraine, Romania, and China. Those business dealings and his messy divorce from ex-wife Kathleen Buhle were laid out in a searing indictment last year that gave a detailed look into the exorbitant amounts of money Biden spent on his lavish lifestyle and sexual deviancy.
Leading up to the trial, federal prosecutors spotlighted Hunter Biden’s Romanian dealings in court papers laying out how his business partners agreed to lobby U.S. officials on behalf of a Romanian oligarch accused of corruption. Biden’s attorneys disputed the Justice Department’s characterization of the agreement and suggested that the court papers were meant to generate headlines.
In June, Weiss’s team won a conviction against Hunter Biden on three federal gun charges for lying about his crack-cocaine addiction on gun paperwork and possessing a firearm while he was addicted to crack almost six years ago. Biden’s sentencing for the gun charges is scheduled to take place in November. He faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison on the gun charges but will likely receive a lesser sentence as a first-time, non-violent offender.
Members of the Biden family were on both sides of the gun trial, which re-opened deep wounds for Buhle and Hunter’s ex-girlfriend Hallie Biden, the widow of Hunter’s late brother Beau. Buhle and Hallie Biden testified for the prosecution about his crack cocaine habit around the time he purchased and possessed the firearm, revealing deeply held trauma caused by Hunter’s erratic behavior. For the defense, Buhle and Hunter Biden’s eldest daughter Naomi testified about his supposed steps towards recovery, but prosecutors quickly undermined her testimony with text messages from the relevant time period.
The tax trial was expected to be politically damaging for Hunter’s father, President Joe Biden, until he dropped out of the presidential race in July following a public Democratic Party revolt over his apparent mental decline. Before he became a lame-duck, President Biden said he would not pardon his son or commute his sentence.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated Thursday the Biden administration’s promise not to give Hunter Biden a pardon and said the president will not re-evaluate his position before leaving office.
Weiss, the U.S. Attorney for Delaware, oversaw the long-running criminal investigation into Hunter Biden that was marred by accusations of special treatment from two veteran IRS agents with years of experience on the case.
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler came forward to Congress last year with explosive allegations that Justice Department officials slow-walked and obstructed routine investigative steps and deliberately allowed the statute of limitations to expire on potential tax charges for 2014-15.
The IRS agents turned over hundreds of pages of documents to the House Ways and Means Committee to support their allegations, and House Republicans further substantiated their testimony with witness testimony from Weiss and other top officials on the Hunter Biden case. Biden is now suing the IRS over alleged illegal taxpayer disclosures by Shapley and Ziegler, whose attorneys have asked to intervene in the case and seek a dismissal. When Hunter Biden was indicted on tax charges, the IRS whistleblowers said they had been vindicated.
“Shapley risked his career for the principle of equal treatment under the law, and now that principle has been vindicated,” Shapley’s legal team said in a statement following Biden’s guilty plea.
Last summer, soon after the IRS agents blew the whistle, Hunter Biden’s guilty plea agreement with Weiss’s office collapsed under scrutiny from Delaware federal judge Maryellen Noreika. The arrangement would have allowed Hunter Biden to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors in Delaware and sign a pretrial diversion agreement for a single gun felony.
Once the plea deal fell apart, Attorney General Merrick Garland named Weiss special counsel, setting the stage for the gun and tax charges. Garland has largely been deferential to Weiss’s handling of the investigation in response to scrutiny over how it was executed.
The Justice Department’s handling of the Hunter Biden probe and his foreign business dealings formed the basis of the House GOP’s impeachment inquiry into President Biden’s involvement with his son’s business enterprise.
The House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means committees uncovered $27 million worth of payments from foreign sources to Biden and his business partners, and they accused Joe Biden of committing “impeachable conduct” during his vice presidency in order to further his son’s influence-peddling.