Hunter Biden will seek to dismiss felony tax charges at Los Angeles hearing Wednesday
By Marshall Cohen, CNN
Los Angeles (CNN) — Attorneys for Hunter Biden and special counsel David Weiss are set for a courtroom showdown Wednesday over the future of his felony tax indictment.
Weiss charged President Joe Biden’s son in December with nine tax offenses. Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have since lodged several bids to throw out part or all of the charges, which will be argued in front of a federal judge in Los Angeles.
The eventual decision from US District Judge Mark Scarsi on the fate of the tax charges could have an impact on the 2024 election, where Joe Biden is currently locked in a tight race against former President Donald Trump, who faces his own criminal trials this year. (Scarsi is a Trump appointee who was confirmed in a bipartisan Senate vote.)
Federal prosecutors say Hunter Biden repeatedly failed to file his taxes on time, missed deadlines to pay his IRS debts, and engaged in a criminal tax-evasion scheme over several years by filing false tax returns and cooking the books on his company’s payroll.
While Hunter Biden is accused of dodging taxes on income from China and Ukraine, nothing in the indictment backs up Republicans’ assertion that he and his father corruptly earned millions overseas together. Those claims were on display last week at a hearing in the House GOP impeachment inquiry, which has now all but sputtered out.
Even so, Hunter Biden still needs to grapple with the criminal charges, and his team has seized on the impeachment effort to argue that the case should be tossed.
In court filings, they claimed Weiss only brought the felony tax case because he “caved to outside pressure” from Trump and congressional Republicans, who repeatedly called for his prosecution, and then erupted when Weiss proposed a plea deal last summer, which later fell apart.
“Mr. Biden is being targeted because of his political and familial affiliations,” they wrote.
They also argued that the case must be dismissed because it has been hopelessly tainted by the actions of two IRS agents who previously worked on the probe but later become whistleblowers and cooperated with the House GOP impeachment inquiry.
“The government’s actions in this case are beyond egregious,” Hunter Biden’s lawyers wrote, accusing the IRS agents of “taking the law into their own hands” by leaking his tax records to Republicans and pursuing “vigilante justice in the court of public opinion.”
Special counsel prosecutors have pushed back on Hunter Biden’s theory that they only filed the felony charges because of GOP pressure. (Ironically, last year, Republicans had accused Weiss of buckling to Democratic pressure from Joe Biden to go soft on his son – which Weiss also denied.)
“From this fairly unremarkable set of procedural events, the defendant concocts a conspiracy theory that the prosecution has ‘upped the ante’ to appease politicians who have absolutely nothing to do with the prosecution,” prosecutors wrote in a filing.
Hunter Biden was separately indicted in Delaware in connection with three alleged gun crimes. (He denies wrongdoing.) The gun trial is slated to begin June 3, which would be a few weeks before the scheduled June 20 trial date for the tax charges in California.
The-CNN-Wire
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