Just six months ago, Hunter Biden had reason to think his legal woes would soon be over — and now, they’re more serious than ever.
Special counsel David Weiss indicted the president’s son on nine tax charges Thursday, accusing Hunter of failing to file or pay taxes in some years (despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal expenses), and of lying on his tax forms for 2018 (including by falsely claiming deductions and business expenses for payments to strip clubs, escorts, a sex club, and women he was seeing).
It’s a remarkable turnabout by Weiss when compared to June of this year, when he had agreed to a plea deal with Hunter that would charge him in a far more limited fashion. That plea deal had resulted in much criticism from Republicans (and IRS agents who had worked the case) that Hunter was getting let off too easy. Then, the deal dramatically collapsed in court when questioning from a Delaware judge revealed prosecutors and defense attorneys didn’t even agree on how much immunity the deal would provide Hunter.
Now Weiss is coming down hard. Already, in September, he’d charged Hunter in Delaware with crimes related to his purchase of a gun while he was addicted to drugs. The new indictment, which had to be filed in California because that’s where Hunter lived at the time, piles on a set of detailed and often lurid charges.
Hunter’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, claimed in a statement that Weiss was simply “bowing to Republican pressure,” and that “if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden,” the charges “would not have been brought.”
Of course, the new charges are just part of a bigger saga that has been going on for years — because Donald Trump’s allies have long viewed Hunter Biden as one of President Biden’s greatest political liabilities and sought to link Hunter’s questionable business and personal conduct to Joe himself. They’ve been largely unsuccessful in doing this so far. (Meanwhile,…
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