Hunter Biden Takes Plea Deal On Tax, Gun Charges
Hunter Biden, the long-embattled son of President Joe Biden who has been constantly the subject of speculation and news coverage over his personal conduct, has agreed to plead guilty to two tax-related charges and diversion on a gun charge.
President Biden’s son Hunter has reached a tentative agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to the facts of a gun charge under terms that would likely keep him out of jail, according to court papers filed Tuesday.
Any proposed plea deal would have to be approved by a federal judge. Both the prosecutors and the defense counsel have requested a court hearing at which Hunter Biden, 53, can enter his plea.
The agreement caps an investigation that was opened in 2018 during the Trump administration, and has generated intense interest and criticism since 2020 from Republican politicians who accused the Biden administration of reluctance to pursue the case. The terms of the proposed deal — negotiated with Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a holdover from President Donald Trump’s administration — are likely to face similar scrutiny.
The court papers indicate the younger Biden has tentatively agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay in 2017 and 2018. The combined tax liability is roughly $1.2 million over those years, according to people familiar with the plea deal, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe details of the agreement that are not yet public. Prosecutors plan to recommend a sentence of probation for those counts, these people said. Biden’s representatives have said he previously paid back the IRS what he owed.
In a letter filed in federal court in Wilmington on Tuesday, federal prosecutors said they were filing two documents called criminal informations — typically used in cases in which a defendant has agreed to plead guilty.
“The defendant has agreed to plead guilty to both counts of the tax Information,” the prosecutors wrote. The second criminal information is about the gun charge. In that case, the letter says, “The defendant has agreed to enter a Pretrial Diversion Agreement with respect to the firearm Information.”
Handling the gun charge as a diversion case means Biden will not technically be pleading guilty to that crime. Diversion is an option typically applied to nonviolent offenders with substance abuse problems.
On Oct. 6, federal agents investigating Hunter Biden said they had gathered sufficient evidence to charge him with crimes related to taxes and a gun purchase. (Video: Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
In all, prosecutors will recommend two years of probation and diversion conditions, these people said. If Biden successfully meets the conditions of the diversion program, the gun charge would be removed from his record at the end of that period, the people familiar with the plea deal said.
Unhelpful reminder. The prosecutor was appointed by tfg. Biden didn’t replace him or stop the inquiry. This was all he could find.Report
Much like the Dunham investigation . . . not that MAGA nation will care.Report
Is it the case with all probationers that they’re prohibited from owning a firearm? This seems like an odd charge to me.Report
“The gun purchase that led to the criminal charge happened in late 2018, at a time when, by his own telling in his autobiography, Hunter Biden was regularly abusing crack cocaine. When he filled out paperwork to buy the gun, however, he denied using drugs or having a drug problem, exposing him to a potential charge of making a false statement on the document, as well as illegal gun possession once he acquired the weapon.”Report
Ah. Thanks. I didn’t click through, assuming it’d be paywalled.Report
Heh, caught on the old check-box trick.
Wonder if the Feds checked the videos to see if someone maybe packed his bags for him before getting on an airplane too. I bet he’s gotten on an airplane with bags he hasn’t packed.
Mostly I’m just chuckling over the self-incrimination theater we pretend to care about in various places.Report
My impression is the vast bulk of his “wrongdoing” is legal or unprovable in court. His various jobs look like they’re because of his political connections and trading on his connections seems to be what he brings to the table. It’s the same problem we repeatedly ran into with the Clintons.Report
Except no one can find any explicit examples of Hunters employers getting any bang for their buck. Heck, they so far can’t find things suggesting his employers got even close to obtaining a return on the money they spent on him.Report
That may not be the correct yardstick. What his employers are doing would be illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act if he were a foreign national. If the only reason to give him a plum job is to curry favor with his father, then we don’t need to go any further as far as proving things.Report
The equivalence you muster on these subjects always bemuses. Trump is convicted in a court of law of running a fraudulent foundation and is legally barred from operating another. But you personally can imagine scenarios wherein the Clinton foundation, despite being regularly audited and never found to be crooked in any way, is shady so the two sides must be equivalent.
Likewise Trump and his kids nakedly grifted and operate their offices as revenue streams but you believe in public view but you can think of a round about way that Hunter, evidently operating on his own and delivering no benefit to his purported employers, would be breaking the law If he were a foreign national [narrators voice: Hunter Biden is not a foreign national] so the two sides must be equivalent.Report
I was thinking more of Clinton legally selling pardons. No reason to give a guy a pardon other than the money that was given to his wife’s campaign. No reason to give money to the campaign other than the pardon.
Obviously corrupt, not provably illegal in court.
For the Clinton Foundation, the most problematic branch raised money from people HRC was dealing with professionally as Sec of State. This money all disappeared the moment she lost power and that branch has been closed.
Obviously corrupt, not provably illegal in court.
That you need to compare all this to Trump and his various ethical adventures is seriously damning. Trump should be in prison, and there’s a really good chance that he will be before all this is over.Report
You, yourself, have raised the Clinton’s and the Clinton foundation as an equivalent case to Trumps corruption in the past Dark. I merely remember it and referred to it.
And the fact remains that Hunter is not a foreign national so what he did isn’t illegal. And, more pertinently, the overarching fact is that so far no one has been able to substantiate any connection between Hunter getting these nepo gigs and his employers actually gaining any form of access or policy benefit from employing Hunter. In the absence of that connection the saga of Hunter Biden becomes backpage gossip, not a national scandal.Report
On several occasions I have pointed to these various joke jobs by the children of our politicians as a national scandal.
He’s a good example of it and he’s done it his entire professional career however I’ve pointed to others.
And let me just quote myself: My impression is the vast bulk of his “wrongdoing” is legal or unprovable in court.Report
Business have tax experts that can go right to the edge of the line of legal/illegal. Don’t think politicians don’t do that? The smarter ones do. The ones that are successful do. Shady? Maybe, Legal, yes.Report
No argument from me, the n in networking is for nepotism. It’s as common in politics as it is in business and it’s utterly pervasive in business. And don’t get me started on non-profits.Report
Wait, so was the laptop real?Report
The laptop seems to have existed, yes. Outside of having some stuff specifically embarrassing to Hunter Biden on it everything else about its contents seems to be a fabrication.Report
Oh, that’s good news, then. The laptop had some seriously awful stuff on it.
It’s good to know that the information wasn’t real.Report
The stuff that was on the copy that everyone and their mother fiddled with was awful and very artfully vague. Alarming enough to give the conspiracy theorists much to inveigle about but vague enough that it never drew the FBI out into affirming that it was all fabricated. The stuff that was on the original that the FBI got apparently had none of that stuff since nothing was ginned up for charges using it under Trump and his lot, despite much desperate searching.Report
You don’t think the vids of him doing crack were behind the gun charge? I mean, sure it’s silly that we ask people if they are guilty of crimes or suspicious activity in a frivolous hope they will rat themselves out… but in this one bizarre case, he ratted himself out after-the-fact.
Ultimately, I don’t think we really know what things on the laptop may or may not have pointed the Feds towards things to investigate regarding his finances; Obvs his finances are not entirely what he claims. I doubt the laptop had his ‘secret accounting’ book, but I bet it suggested things to investigate and ask about.
I think a fairly ‘reasonable’ way to integrate the Laptop, the New Yorker Magazine pre-confession, and the various facts that emerged about his business dealings with Burisma and China and elsewhere is that Hunter Biden is probably not an Executive Expert in anything in particular… so his making $M/year is *at best* among the most entitled nepo-baby stories the left loves to hate (but doesn’t in this case) or the worst very well managed (probably by Uncle) legal-ish influence peddling. The laptop explodes the narrative that he’s as competent as Beau and therefore it’s perfectly normal that he’s a successful international business man.
Suppressing it — when we could all read the 2019 New Yorker story — was a tip-off that everyone knew it was real… the campaign tried to get out in front and inoculate us with the confessions. The raw un-filtered info, though, undercuts the ‘grieving brother dealing with some stuff’ that NYM wanted to use.
I don’t know what to tell you, our politicians go to Washington and become much more wealthy than the rest of us who might make low six-figures. Uncanny, really.Report
And their children are hired for $600k/yr jobs that don’t require them to do much and for which they don’t seem qualified. This sort of thing is outlawed for US companies to do for foreign politicians but not for US politicians.
This describes a number of Hunter’s jobs, but I expect the list of people like this is very long and BSDI.
Obviously corrupt, but not provably illegal in court.Report
It’s weird, people seem to want to be politicians… it would be a pay cut for most of us with the qualifications. But altruism and public spirit is its own reward, I suppose.Report
Jared Kushner comes to mind . . . though he drew a public salary while his FIL was in the WH.Report
Sure, seems like he cut some LIV level deals with the Saudis … but good business is just good business. Nothing we can do about being an International Businessman.Report
I’m not disputing that – just pointing out that he was an official White House Senior Advisor while he did it. Which strikes me as way more ethically suspicious ( if not “corrupt”) then taking a board member position while your daddy is VP.Report
Yes, I’m agreeing that it seems there are significant ulterior reasons for being and remaining in politics.
We could perhaps quibble over a hierarchy of sins whether using politics to further existing interests is better/worse than using politics to extract gain without existing interests… but I’d be open to whiteboarding this out.Report
What specific illegal or unethical thing did Jared Kushner do, or was accused of doing, during the Trump Administration?Report
Kushner is also a Billionaire real estate guy. He kept his real estate empire while he was senior advisor to Trump and didn’t sell it or put it in a blind trust.
The problem is, if his holdings were like Trump, that it was literally impossible for him to do otherwise.
Selling 60 NY buildings is a lot harder than selling millions of dollars of stock.Report
We’ve heard this before, and it is nonsense.
1. In all but a rare few cases, it is entirely possible for rich people to separate themselves their complex businesses;
2. In the cases where it isn’t, they should ethically be barred from holding public office.Report
Whatever most rich people can do, a New York Real Estate Billionaire is bound to his business in such a way that it would take years or even decades to separate from it.
With Trump, the American people voted for him anyway. With Kushner, I think we were better off with him in there as a voice of sanity.
If the only ethical problem we have with him is he owns real estate he can’t easily sell then that’s really small beer.Report
That the laptop info reinforces the narrative that Hunter Biden, himself, is an incredible failson dealing on his old man’s name and taking wealthy people for a ride while giving them bupkis in return doesn’t strike me as at all revelatory. I think you’d need to hunt far, wide and deep into the internet to find anyone on the left who doesn’t view Hunter with anything except with the same contemptuous pity or contemptuous disgust they reserve for most nepo babies and failsons.
The primary narrative the right was pushing when the Hunter Biden laptop story was released immediately prior to the 2020 election was not that Hunter Biden was a failson or that he was taking wealthy people for a ride using his Dads’ name; the narrative pushed was that Joe Biden was directly, corruptly and illegally benefiting from Hunter Biden’s activity and that Hunter Biden was providing a back channel means for actors to buy access to and policy concessions from Joe Biden. When the media, viciously burned by Comey’s idiotic (and against policy) intervention in the 2016 election, refused to fall for an even more nakedly fabricated version of the same trick the rights narrative shifted to an aggrieved caterwauling about a “conspiracy” to cover up the laptop “story”.
I’m surprised that you yourself seem to be memory holing the entire Joe Biden angle and rewriting the story of Hunters laptop into a media conspiracy to protect and preserve the reputation of Hunter fishin Biden? Why on earth would the media have covered for this idiot? His being exposed for what he was would have had zero bearing on anything outside the life of one Hunter Biden. As trifling as the internet may be, there’s no way this much digital ink would have been spilled about Hunter Biden if it was simply a story about the relative of a politician trading on said politicians name fraudulently.
To expand on Jaybirds original question- itself artfully vague- the answer is:
-Was the laptop really Hunter Biden’s? Seems so.
-Did the laptop have information that hurts the reputation and possibly criminally implicated Hunter Biden as being in contravention of a number of laws? This seems to be the case.
-Did the laptop contain any information that reflected poorly on Joe Biden? Nope, no sign of anything but communications from an aggrieved and worried Father.
-Was it real? Yes. Was it a scandal? No.Report
No, the point is that the failson is trading on his father’s name in ways that may or may not be illegal and may or may not implicate the father. I don’t really know, and haven’t specifically claimed one thing or another.
My official position that I’ve taken previously is that I think Biden is ‘corrupt’ at exactly the level we find acceptable for our politicians to be corrupt. Basically influence peddling via legal and discreet ‘consulting’ firms (and/or non-profits) run by close confidants and family.
I’m bemused that Hunter Biden couldn’t manage the ‘discreet’ part of the grift. And I’m also bemused that ‘everyone’ in the ‘everyone knew’ sort of way, acknowledged that they needed New Yorker Magazine pre-emptive confession and simultaneously Russian Disinformation levels of Media coordination.
I do, however, think that Nepo-babies of actors becoming actors and Nepo-babies of business men becoming VP’s in the family business is different than Nepo-babies of public officials making millions via ‘Consulting Gigs’. Maybe moreso when the Nepo-baby is, as you say, a ‘failson’.
My position is that we should be curious about things like that… and not label anyone curious about things like that as ‘Russian Disinformation’.Report
There’s a lot of stuff that got called “disinformation” that seems to have been merely “inconvenient information”.
Quickly! Better set up more Arbiters of Truth!Report
That’s not what the original allegations in the Post’s story was. I’m all for raking politicians over the coals for nepotism and the like so climbing the original story down to this level strikes me as a salutary development. I just am unwilling to ignore that a climb down has happened.
And I’m baffled by the repeated return to the well of media disinformation. The article’s allegations against Joe Biden have not been substantiated. That the media didn’t give legs to an unsubstantiated baseless allegation is good news, not bad news.Report
I think for most people, the “Hunter Biden scandal” was the media / bureaucratic disinformation campaign about the laptop.Report
But this is risible- we’ve now examined the laptop for years and found no proof of Joe Biden doing any of the things that the new york post’s article claimed he did. The original article has been falsified but the narrative is now shifted to one that, weeks before the election, the media screened out a false story and didn’t give it legs? Shouldn’t that be cause for celebration, not approbation?Report
I don’t remember the original New York Post article. I remember 51 ostensible authorities saying that the claimed existence of the laptop bore all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign though. And the story didn’t “shift” to that either. Leading up to the election, the supposed disinformation campaign was in the news far more than any claims about what was on the laptop.Report
“The original article has been falsified”
I think we’re exceeding our knowledge here… the last ‘investigative’ information we have is that the Burisma emails (the original claim) were verified independently by the NYT.
“”People familiar” with a federal investigation of Hunter Biden, it reports, “said prosecutors had examined emails” between him, his former business partner Devon Archer, “and others” regarding “Burisma and other foreign business activity.” Those emails “were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop.” The messages “were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”
(-via Reason linked below)
Now, whether or not there’s any actual wrong doing or crimes? I don’t know, and we don’t know what the FBI is doing with it either — if there’s a definitive statement, I’d be interested to see it.
IF I’m keeping up with the scorecard correctly, the Tax issues pre-date the Laptop. The Burisma emails that were the ‘sketchy’ part of the NYPost dump *were* validated by NYT… the Tax issues have wrapped up with a plea bargain.
Honest question, has the FBI stated that this wraps up any other issues (like unregistered Foreign Agent charges) that HB *might* be under investigation? Or are we just assuming that ‘all they got’ was the Tax stuff? I don’t know… but I haven’t seen any statement that everything related to HB is a closed book.
I’m all out of NYT reads, but this one from Reason covers the NYT verification and the broader range of ‘questionable’ activities for which HB might still be liable.
https://reason.com/2022/03/17/the-new-york-times-belatedly-admits-the-emails-on-hunter-bidens-abandoned-laptop-are-real-and-newsworthy/Report
Obviously, one cannot prove a negative but if the original laptop actually contained the information the NYP alleged it did then Trumps FBI would have been howling to the skies about it. Even the data copies that Guiliani, and everyone else who felt like doing so, had meddled with only contained some very vague allusions to Biden which “coincidentally” were risqué enough for media folks to inveigle about while, simultaneously, not being concrete enough that the FBI would feel any pressure to come out and say “that stuff isn’t on the untampered laptop, it’s made up” or “That stuff is on the untampered laptop and we’re investigating it.” It’s now been four years since the laptop was found and a significant portion of one of those years took place under an administration that was desperate to find dirt on Joe Biden. That no charges, no whisper of charges, no substantiation of the allegations against Joe Biden have so far emerged suggests to me that the allegations in the New York Post again Joe Biden are falsified. If you say “Joe’s a crook” and I say “prove it” and then you go four years providing nothing you can’t say “Joe’s never been proven not to be a crook” well, you can, but everyone outside the circle of true believers will just roll their eyes at the obvious con.
The original New York Post story from October 14 2020, alleged two things; first that the laptop existed and, second, that it contained information that demonstrated that Joe Biden was corrupt. There’s this two step that constantly goes on with this laptop story wherein people keep pointing out that the first premise of the article is correct (the laptop does indeed exist) and then happily imply that means the second premise is also correct. When challenged on the second premise they just retreat back to pointing out the first premise is correct. The only reason anyone outside some tax and gun registration authorities care strongly about this laptop story, though, is the second premise which remains, utterly and completely, unproven.
As far as I know the FBI hasn’t stated anything to Hunter Biden saying “You’re in the clear.” Frankly I don’t particularly care if he is in the clear; I’m not Joe Biden; I wouldn’t bat an eyelash if that idiot Hunter got locked up, heck I’d probably be glad since he obviously has done enough idiotic and unscrupulous things to deserve being locked up over.Report
I think the most pertinent word to this discussion should be evidence. One can probably fairly assume the worst about Hunter Biden. One can probably also fairly assume that Joe Biden is within the ‘normal politician’ range of things politicians do that are unseemly. After all, he’s a pretty normal politician.
But at a certain point you have to provide the goods and as far as I can tell the people deeply interested in this laptop stuff never have.Report
Agreed.Report
Is there any proof that the laptop had been tampered with? Without some, it’s just an assertion, no more credible than any assertion you’re complaining about.Report
There was no disinformation campaign. Because Rudy Guiliani kept things close to his vest, and because there was a lot about the laptop that couldn’t initially be verified – kind of like the current claims of tapes of accepting bribes come to think of it – people were overly cautious. Meaning they didn’t buy the sensationalist stories initially.
What the GOP and its political operatives are trying to do now is take yet another victory lap and throw it away because the thing he has pled guilty to isn’t “big” enough to trash his father with.
Because all they have is mud to sling for grieved white Americans, while all the while proposing tax cuts for the rich and dismantling the regulatory state.Report
Do you still think so, even after you read about the wargames conducted about this explicitly? Censorship, as driven by the government, was about no longer asking “is it fit to print”.Report
As far as I can tell, some of those “embarrassing” things related to foreign activity and family finances, and may still be under investigation.Report
The House claims it is trying to investigate them, but with dead informants and missing whistle blowers.Report
As they should be, but by all indications there’s no sign of any scandal implicating the administration or Joe Biden himself.Report
Hunter Smith would never have been prosecuted at all for what Hunter Biden pleaded to, and Biden’s sentence will doubtless reflect that. Predictable people will nevertheless talk about a “sweetheart deal” proving that Biden got off because of who he was, even though it was only because of who he was that he was prosecuted and sanctioned at all.
Of course, people will claim that there must have been more even though a Trump-appointed, but nevertheless reputable, U.S. Attorney couldn’t find anything after a thorough investigation. There’s no use engaging them. Hypothetical crimes and cover-ups can never be refuted.Report
Roger Stone certainly wasn’t for the tax issues.Report