Hunter Biden reaches deal to plead guilty to tax charges
Hunter Biden on Tuesday agreed with the Justice Department to plead guilty to two felony tax charges and accept terms that would allow him to avoid prosecution for a separate gun charge, a major step toward ending a long-running and politically explosive finance research. drug use and international business dealings of President Biden’s troubled son.
Under a deal struck with a federal prosecutor appointed by President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden agreed to plead guilty to felony charges of failing to pay his 2017 and 2018 taxes on time and be sentenced to probation .
The Justice Department has also charged Mr Biden but said, under what is known as a pretrial diversion agreement, it would not prosecute him in connection with his 2018 handgun purchase during a period when he was using drugs. The deal is conditional on Mr Biden remaining drug-free for 24 months and agreeing never to own a firearm again.
The agreement must still be approved by a federal judge. Mr. Biden is expected to appear in court in Delaware in the coming days to face tax filing charges and plead guilty.
“With the announcement of two agreements between my client, Hunter Biden, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, it is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter has been resolved,” Biden’s attorney Christopher Clark said in a statement. declaration.
Assuming there are no last-minute changes or complications, the deal would most likely resolve the investigation without Biden facing a federal prison sentence.
While years of research by a Republican-appointed prosecutor found evidence to accuse Mr. Biden only of the narrow tax and gun issues rather than the broader international conspiracies promoted by Mr. Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill, the agreement attacked by the right as too lenient.
The agreement came less than two weeks after the Justice Department indicted Trump on charges that he risked exposing national security secrets and obstructed government efforts to recover classified documents from him. On Tuesday, Republicans argued that the deal showed partisan double standards, despite the clear differences in the nature and scope of the matters.
“The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by merely giving Hunter Biden a ‘traffic ticket,’” Trump proclaimed on his website Truth Social.
The federal prosecutor who oversaw the investigation and signed the agreement, David C. Weiss, the U.S. Attorney in Delaware, set out the terms in a brief public statement which concluded, without further elaboration, “The investigation is ongoing.”
White House spokesman Ian Sams said in a statement: “The President and First Lady love and support their son as he continues to build his life. We have no further comment.”
The crimes to which Mr Biden pleads guilty, said Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University and an expert on sentencing, are crimes for which the average person is rarely prosecuted because they are usually only charged with more serious charges. crimes.
“If these are the only violations, most prosecutors will say it’s not worth a federal case,” Berman said. “They’d say let’s not make it a federal case for the average person because it’s not worth bringing a case unless there’s reason to be concerned there’s a public safety issue or trust that everyone will be treated equally under the law.” at stake.”
Mr. Berman said federal prosecutors were in a unique situation in this case because the high-profile defendant was the subject of investigations for a variety of activities. Failure to file some charges when there is no factual dispute, he said, could give the impression of a two-tier court system.
“Everyone is paying attention and the facts are not in dispute, so not filing charges would give the impression that special treatment or clemency was given to the president’s son,” Berman said.
No one doubts that Mr. Biden, a 53-year-old attorney with a Yale degree, has had significant personal problems and pursued a professional path that intersected with his father in ways that raised ethical issues.
After his father became vice president in 2009, he built million-dollar relationships with wealthy foreigners, leading to concerns within the Obama administration and among government watchdog groups that he was cashing in on his family name.
He went into a tailspin after his brother, Beau, died in 2015, becoming addicted to crack cocaine and engaging in tasteless, self-destructive behavior.
As president, Mr. Trump had long tried to tie Hunter Biden’s business deals and personal problems to his father. Trump’s initial impeachment stemmed from his efforts to persuade the Ukrainian government to help him expose wrongdoing in Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, and while in the White House he put it Department of Justice under pressure to launch an investigation.
The Justice Department investigation continued after President Biden took office, overseen by Mr. Weiss, the Trump appointee, who was detained and allowed to complete the investigation. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland testified before Congress that Mr. Weiss had full authority and independence to decide whether to bring a case against Mr. Biden.
In a letter last month to Representative Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Weiss said he had been granted “ultimate authority over this matter, including the responsibility to decide where, when and if charges must be submitted. ”
While the outcome of the investigation appeared fairly straightforward in the five pages of documents made public on Tuesday, it was the result of lengthy back and forth between Mr Biden’s lawyers and the Justice Department. The exchange was more like the interactions between the government and a large corporation dealing with a complex investigation.
The discussions began several years ago when Mr Biden’s lawyers responded to grand jury subpoenas while prosecutors were investigating a range of cases, including his dealings with Chinese investors and his work for Burisma, whose board he served while his father , as vice president, oversaw the Obama administration’s policy toward Ukraine.
After it became clear that the investigation had been limited to only the tax and weapons issues, negotiations proceeded slowly. Legal experts said the use of the diversion deal to resolve the gun charge was creative, quite unusual and probably the product of Mr Weiss wanting to show the government’s refusal to look the other way on behavior that was likely criminal but rarely is. continued.
“Hunter will take responsibility for two counts of misconduct and failure to file tax payments under a settlement agreement,” Mr Clark said in his statement. “A firearms charge, which will be subject to a preliminary diversion agreement and will not be the subject of the plea agreement, will also be filed by the government.”
Mr Clark continued: “I know it is important to Hunter to take responsibility for the mistakes he made during a period of turmoil and addiction in his life. He looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward.”
The investigation focused on a particularly chaotic and inappropriate period in Hunter Biden’s life, when he was addicted to crack cocaine. But the Justice Department has seen almost every major aspect of his life over the past 15 years — a period that also included struggling to control his alcoholism and engaging in international business deals, which he took part in at least in part because of the fame of his father. in the politics.
Ultimately, however, the investigation boiled down to two issues.
One was his taxes. Prosecutors had considered whether to charge him in connection with failing to meet the filing deadlines for his 2017 and 2018 taxes, and whether he had falsely claimed $30,000 in business expense deductions.
In his statement on Tuesday, Mr. Weiss said Mr. Biden had earned more than $1.5 million in both 2017 and 2018, but failed to file an income tax return despite owing the government more than $100,000 each year. (Mr Biden paid the back tax bill in 2021.)
The second issue was whether Mr Biden lied on a US government form he filled out when he bought the gun in 2018. In response to a question on the form as to whether he was on drugs, Mr Biden had said he was not. — a claim that prosecutors suspected might be false based on his erratic behavior at the time and accounts of people associated with him.
Under the agreement announced Tuesday, Mr Biden will acknowledge that he “possessed a firearm despite knowing he was an unlawful user of and addicted to a controlled substance,” Mr Weiss’ statement said.
Not long after purchasing the gun, Beau’s widow, Hallie Biden, with whom Hunter was romantically involved at the time, found the gun in his truck. Fearing he would use the gun to take his own life, Ms Biden threw it in a dumpster.
Republicans’ claims that the elder President Biden’s Justice Department made it easy for his son are unlikely to go away.
In April, an IRS supervisor who had overseen the investigation into Hunter Biden hired a lawyer and went to Congress, alleging political favoritism in the way the investigation had been handled. Republicans in Congress have pledged to investigate the claims, which have also been referred to Justice Department inspectors general and the IRS
Reporting contributed by Seamus Hughes, Reid J. Epstein, Luke Broadwater, Glenn Thrush, Kayla Guo And Jonathan Weisman.