Hunter Biden pleads guilty as the tax evasion trial starts

Hunter, the son of US President Joe Biden, entered a guilty plea on Thursday as jury selection was about to begin in his tax evasion trial, a matter that has embarrassed and diverted the attention of the president.

The 54-year-old is charged with withholding $1.4 million in taxes over the course of the last ten years, allegedly using the money for lavish lifestyle, prostitutes, and drug abuse.

It was expected that the trial would revisit vile facts of a life that the defendant and his relatives, including the president, had long since admitted had spiraled out of control.

But on Thursday morning, as US District Judge Mark Scarsi was readying to oversee the selection of a jury, Biden’s lawyers said their client was prepared to plead guilty.

Attorney Abbe Lowell said Biden was willing to enter a guilty plea, although he would continue to maintain his innocence.

A so-called “Alford plea” is offered when a defendant acknowledges a trial would likely result in a guilty verdict, even while he insists he is not culpable.

It was not immediately clear if the plea would apply to all nine tax-related counts—three felonies and six misdemeanours—of failing to pay taxes.

Scarsi declared a recess that will allow prosecutors to discuss the move, and the court is expected to reconvene later Thursday.

Biden has already spent a chunk of 2024 in court, having been convicted in Delaware of lying about his drug use when he bought a gun — a felony.

In 2023, Hunter reached a plea deal on minor tax and gun charges, concluding a five-year probe that involved persistent Republican allegations that major crimes were being covered up.

A year later, in June 2024, a jury found the young Biden guilty of federal gun charges in a historic first criminal prosecution of the child of a sitting US president.

Political battle

Lawyers for Biden say he is only before the court now because of who he is.

“They want to slime him because that is the whole purpose,” Biden’s attorney Mark Geragos reportedly said during an August hearing in which he accused prosecutors of attempted character assassination.

Biden’s defense team argues that the non-payment of taxes was an oversight in a life wrought chaotic by a spiralling drug addiction and the trauma of losing his older brother, Beau, to a brain tumour in 2015.

Biden has paid the back taxes, as well as penalties levied by authorities, and had previously reached a plea deal that would have kept him out of jail.

That agreement fell apart at the last minute, and Biden is understood to have been trying to reach another ever since.

But that has been difficult for prosecutors whose every move in this election year is being scrutinised by Republicans who charge the defendant is being treated leniently because he is the president’s son.

Hunter Biden has for years been a foil for his father’s political opponents, who have sought—without producing evidence—to smear the family as a group of criminals who have gained wealth and power because of Joe Biden’s career.

The elder Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in favour of Kamala Harris has taken much of the zeal out of the Republican drive to make an example out of his son.

Guilty verdicts could result in up to 17 years in prison for Biden. The gun felony, which he is yet to be sentenced on, carries a maximum 25-year term.

Hunter Biden, a Yale-trained lawyer and lobbyist-turned-artist who lives in Malibu, has said that he has been drug-free since 2019.

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