Leo Wise, the special prosecutor in the Hunter Biden case, has rejected a last-minute request on Thursday for Joe Biden’s son to plead guilty and avoid a new trial on nine tax crimes and evading $1.4 million in taxes. Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s attorney, announced the change of heart this morning, minutes before jury selection began in a federal court in Los Angeles. “Hunter Biden is not innocent, he is guilty. And he does not deserve to plead not guilty with a special situation that can only apply to him,” Wise said midday today. In June, Hunter Biden was found guilty of illegally purchasing and possessing a gun in a trial held in Delaware. His sentence will be announced a week after the November 5 election.
In the middle of the tug-of-war between the defense and the prosecution is the Alford plea, a rarely used legal figure in which a defendant can maintain his innocence while accepting the punishment imposed by the judge. Biden would then admit that the prosecution has enough evidence to achieve a conviction, but thus avoid the month-long process and the interview of some 30 witnesses on the stand. According to Wise, this strategy would only underline something that he intends to prove during the trial, that the son of the president of the United States has received special treatment thanks to who he is. The special prosecutor has asked the judge in the case, Mark Scarsi, for time to write an argument rejecting this argument. Scarsi, a judge who came to the district court appointed by Donald Trump, has agreed. The session will resume at nine o’clock on Friday morning.
“I think this can be resolved today,” Lowell had optimistically told reporters waiting outside the courthouse. The prosecution team has said it has no objections to Hunter taking this position. The defense’s request came as a surprise to everyone. One of the prosecutors told the judge that this morning was the first time he heard the idea from Lowell’s mouth and ruled out the possibility of a prior agreement with the defendant.
Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race has somewhat dampened interest in Hunter Biden’s second trial. The trial was in danger of becoming a political bombshell that could derail his father’s bid to stay in the White House. It now threatens to become a scandal in the twilight of the presidential campaign, but still has the potential to impact Kamala Harris in the final stretch of the campaign.
Prosecutors have prepared a case that aims to expose Hunter Biden’s business dealings abroad, including with a Romanian businessman, Gabriel Popoviciu, who hired him to gain access to the US government. Republicans have been accusing him for years of enriching himself by showing off his influence in the Democratic administration with foreign companies such as Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where he was an adviser between 2014 and 2018. He began his tenure when his father was Barack Obama’s vice president.
The trial could not only damage the Democratic administration. It also promised to become another stain on the Biden family. Hunter Biden’s defense team complained at a court hearing in late August that prosecutors were intent on “character assassinating” the first son of a sitting president to sit in the dock. “They want to cover him in mud because that’s the whole purpose of this trial,” said Mark Geragos, one of the attorneys.
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Geragos then complained to the judge that prosecutors wanted to present to the jury a series of salacious details intended to illustrate the high life, full of alcohol, drugs, sex and luxury, that Hunter Biden lived while evading taxes for four years. Biden, a graduate of Yale and Georgetown whose addictions led him to share crack with addicts in low-rent motels in Los Angeles, eventually paid about $2 million in back taxes and penalties. The settlement came after he learned that authorities were investigating his finances.
Prosecutors have a wealth of information that Republicans have used as ammunition against the Bidens. These include a payment to a prostitute and a $1,500 transfer to a dancer. striptease. Many of the expenses and excesses were revealed by Hunter himself in his autobiography, Pretty Things (2021). In April 2018, he paid $1,700 to rent a Lamborghini when he first arrived in California, where he resides. Between April and May of that year, the lobbyist He spent $43,000 to stay at the Chateau Marmont, the famous hotel on Sunset Boulevard frequented by movie stars. Later that year, he lent his then-partner $7,215 to pay for Airbnb accommodations.
Prosecutor David Weiss says Biden used hotels as a residence. This lifestyle left a trail of trips and overnight stays in Atlantic City, New York and Los Angeles totaling $112,000. “These stays had no business purpose… Instead, as he describes in his memoir, they were used to meet with his then-girlfriend and for constant partying,” the prosecution claimsWeiss says he also passed off personal expenses as corporate expenses in his financials, including paying tuition for one of his daughters at Columbia University in New York.
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