Hunter Biden Pleads Guilty in tax case, Avoiding second Trial

Hunter Biden pleads guilty in tax case, avoiding second criminal trial, Judge Mark Scarsi asked Hunter Biden if he understood a guilty plea meant he could face up to 17 years in prison and fines of up to $1.3 million. Biden said yes.

President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden pleads guilty to nine federal tax charges this Thursday, a surprising turn that allows him to avoid a second criminal trial but still exposes him to significant prison time.

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Sentencing is set for Dec. 16. The last-minute plea, on the day when jury selection was supposed to begin, means members of Biden’s family will not have to testify about embarrassing and traumatic details in his life and theirs.

U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi asked Hunter Biden in court if he understood a guilty plea would mean he could face up to 17 years in prison and fines of up to $1.3 million, and would lose the right to run for public office in some states. Biden said he did. As each of the charges was read, he repeated that he was pleading guilty.

“I will not subject my family to more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment,” Hunter Biden said in a statement Thursday evening, saying that “prosecutors were focused not on justice but on dehumanizing me for my actions during my addiction.”

While the president could pardon his son before leaving office in January, he and his aides have said repeatedly that he will not do so — a claim White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeated on Thursday.

“No,” she told reporters on Air Force One while travelling with the president to an event in Wisconsin. “It is still very much a no.”

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She would not comment on whether the president knew ahead of time about his son’s decision to offer the plea.

Special counsel David Weiss charged Biden last year with three felonies and six misdemeanours, including failing to file and pay taxes, tax evasion and filing false tax returns. He is accused of failing to pay at least $1.4 million in federal taxes from 2016 through 2019, though he has since repaid that amount.

Weiss separately charged Biden last year with three felony gun counts in Delaware. A jury convicted Biden on all three charges in June, and he is scheduled for sentencing in that case in November.

Thursday’s guilty plea marked a dramatic culmination of a long personal, political, and legal saga in which Hunter Biden’s past misdeeds have faced public scrutiny and weighed heavily on the 46th president. The younger Biden’s first trial forced his relatives to relive some of the darkest moments of his spiral into addiction. Several family members were expected to be called to the stand in Los Angeles, and Biden’s past indiscretions again would be put on full display.

The indictments came after a lengthy investigation into Biden’s business dealings while his father was vice president, which Republican lawmakers and former president Donald Trump have tried to use as evidence of corruption within the Biden family. No evidence has surfaced publicly to suggest any wrongdoing by Joe Biden.

Tax evasion is common — American individuals and companies underpay their taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars each year — but criminal charges for tax evasion are rare. The Internal Revenue Service often does not find out about underpayment of taxes at all, and when agents do, they typically handle it by auditing the taxpayer and charging them fees, not by charging them with a crime.

Before agreeing to plead guilty to the tax charges, Biden tried to resolve the case by offering an Alford plea, in which a defendant maintains he is innocent but acknowledges that the prosecution’s evidence would likely result in a guilty verdict. Prosecutors said they would not agree to such a deal.

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“I want to make crystal clear: The U.S. opposes an Alford plea. … Hunter Biden is not innocent, he is guilty,” Leo Wise, an attorney working for the special counsel, told the judge. “We came to court to try this case.”

After consulting with his attorneys, Biden entered a more typical plea in which he admitted guilt to all the allegations in the tax indictment.

One of those lawyers, Abbe Lowell, praised his client’s decision outside the courthouse following the guilty plea. “Hunter put his family first today,” Lowell said. “And it was a brave and loving thing for him to do.

Biden arrived at the courthouse holding hands with his wife, Melissa, and accompanied by friends. First lady Jill Biden and other family members, who were a daily presence during his trial in Wilmington, did not join him.

The younger Hunter Biden who pleads guilty has said he has undergone addiction treatment and has been sober for five years. While his addiction to crack cocaine was a central theme of his gun trial, the Los Angeles case had been expected to delve into Biden’s lavish spending and sex life during that period — much of which he chronicled in his 2021 memoir. Among the accusations in the indictment is that Biden wrote off money he paid sex workers as business expenses on his tax forms.

Hunter Biden who pleads guilty had agreed to a plea deal on both the gun and tax charges last summer, but that deal fell apart over questions about Biden’s immunity from any possible future charges.

On Thursday, his attorneys appeared eager to resolve the Los Angeles case, with Lowell responding to an earlier remark from the judge about whether it was in the public interest to hold a jury trial.

“Your Honor has indicated that there is a need to address the public interest, but Mr. Biden needs to address the private interest,” Lowell said. “We saw the exhibit list, the witness list, there are more than half a dozen members of his immediate family. There is also a private interest that has to be considered.”

Lowell stated that Biden wanted to avoid a trial so “his family doesn’t have to spend one more day talking about what happened when he was a man addicted to drugs.”

Wise responded by arguing that Biden should be prosecuted for his crimes. “The truth matters,” he said. “We are not here because of what the government did. We are not the ones that are deciding to call members of his family. He is the one that triggered this series of events.”

Federal judges tend to sentence defendants in tax cases to less time than recommended by federal guidelines. A U.S. Sentencing Commission report last year said the average tax case sentence was 16 months, even though the average minimum sentence recommended by the guidelines was 28 months in prison. Nearly four in 10 defendants received no prison time at all.

The fact that Hunter Biden has paid his taxes in full could help soften the sentence, though Scarsi will also consider his felony conviction in Delaware.

In all, 363 people were sentenced for tax fraud in the country last year, according to the sentencing commission.

“Like millions of Americans, I failed to file and pay my taxes on time. For that I am responsible. As I have stated, addiction is not an excuse, but it is an explanation for some of my failures at issue in this case,” Biden said in his statement.

He added that he cannot repay his family for the support they have given him.

“But I can protect them from being publicly humiliated for my failures,” he said. “For anyone now going through the scourge of addiction, please know there is a light at the end of that seemingly endless tunnel. I was where you are now. Don’t quit right before the miracle.”