Hunter Biden has been charged in connection with a long-running Justice Department investigation into his taxes – the second criminal case that special counsel David Weiss has brought against President Joe Biden’s son.
The charges span nine counts, including failure to file and pay taxes; evasion of assessment; and false or fraudulent tax return. CNN was first to report a new criminal case had been filed.
According to the special counsel’s team, Hunter Biden “engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million” in taxes that he owed from 2016 through 2019. Though Hunter Biden did eventually pay his taxes from 2018, prosecutors allege that he included “false business deductions in order to evade assessment of taxes to reduce the substantial tax liabilities he faced.”
Prosecutors also allege in the indictment that he “subverted the payroll and tax withholding process of his own company” by withdrawing millions of dollars outside of its payroll and tax withholding process.
The president’s son “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills,” the indictment states.
Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement that “based on the facts and the law, if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought.”
“First, U.S. Attorney Weiss bowed to Republican pressure to file unprecedented and unconstitutional gun charges to renege on a non-prosecution resolution. Now, after five years of investigating with no new evidence – and two years after Hunter paid his taxes in full – the U.S. Attorney has piled on nine new charges when he had agreed just months ago to resolve this matter with a pair of misdemeanors,” he continued.
Asked for comment, the White House referred CNN to…
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