Hunter Biden Pleads Guilty to Federal Tax Charges

Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to all federal charges in his tax evasion case Thursday, avoiding a trial that was expected to be a grueling and costly public spectacle about his profligate spending habits and foreign business deals.

After his recent conviction on felony gun charges, Biden was facing a second criminal trial in a federal case over allegedly evading taxes on income earned from those foreign deals. The trial was set to begin Thursday with jury selection in a Los Angeles federal court, but Biden’s lawyers offered a surprise last-minute Alford plea in which he would maintain his innocence but concede there is enough evidence for a conviction. His lawyers backed away from that plan after prosecutors vociferously opposed it, and Biden ultimately pleaded guilty to nine charges related to tax fraud and evasion. 

Biden, 54, took an open plea, which means his sentencing is up to the judge—in this case, District Judge Mark Scarsi, a Donald Trump appointee—without a prearranged agreement with prosecutors. Sentencing will be on Dec. 16, after November’s presidential election. “With regard to sentencing, there’s no guarantees,” Scarsi said, according to Politico. The Washington Post reports that Scarsi told Biden he could face up to 17 years in prison and fines of up to $1.3 million. 

Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, was charged with failing to pay at least $1.4 million in federal taxes from 2016 through 2019 related to his foreign consultancy work. The indictment outlines nine counts against him, including two felony counts of filing a false return and an additional felony count of tax evasion. He has said that he repaid the government his delinquent taxes.

Federal prosecutors, led by Leo Wise and Derek Hines, have laid out a narrative depicting Biden as someone who chose to spend extravagantly on drugs, escorts, and fancy cars rather than fulfilling his tax obligations. In the indictment, they allege that he mischaracterized personal expenditures as business deductions, such as college tuition for his children and over $27,000 spent on online pornography. “He describes partying in hotels with a cast of strippers,” Wise said at a previous court hearing. “He chose to pay them, which is fine—it’s America, you can do that. But then he chose to take it as a business deduction."

Biden’s defense team, led by attorney Mark Geragos, have argued that his struggles with substance abuse—compounded by personal trauma from the death of his mother and his sister in a 1972 car accident when he was 3 years old and the death of his brother from cancer in 2015—impaired his ability to manage his finances responsibly. “The DOJ wants to paint a picture of a guy without a care in the world, partying at Chateau Marmont, without giving context as to what from his past may have affected him,” Geragos said at an earlier hearing.

Republicans have long used Biden’s bouts with drug addiction and his business dealings with Burisma, a scandal-plagued Ukrainian energy firm, and CEFC, a now-bankrupt Chinese conglomerate, to try to weaken his dad politically, opening congressional inquiries into Biden’s work in the private sector and investigating whether it had any impact on Joe Biden’s decisions as President or Vice President. But their attempts to portray the Bidens as a “crime family” have failed to produce evidence implicating Joe Biden in Hunter Biden’s business activities.

President Biden hasn’t commented publicly on his son’s tax evasion charges, but has previously said he would not use his presidential powers to pardon him. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that President Biden will not pardon Hunter, and also said the President wouldn’t try to commute Hunter’s sentence.