Hunter Biden Investigation: Hunter Biden to Plead Guilty on Misdemeanor Tax Charges (Published 2023) (2024)

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The deal likely resolves Hunter Biden’s federal investigation without prison time.

The Justice Department also charged Mr. Biden but, under what is known as a pretrial diversion agreement, said it would not prosecute him in connection with his purchase of a handgun in 2018 during a period when he was using drugs. The deal is contingent on Mr. Biden remaining drug-free for 24 months and agreeing never to own a firearm again.

The agreement must still be approved by a federal judge. Mr. Biden is expected to appear in court in Delaware in the coming days to be arraigned on the misdemeanor tax charges and plead guilty.

“With the announcement of two agreements between my client, Hunter Biden, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, it is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved,” Mr. Biden’s lawyer, Christopher Clark, said in a statement.

Assuming there are no last-minute changes or complications, the deal would most likely resolve the investigation without Mr. Biden facing a federal prison sentence.

Even though years of investigation by a Republican-appointed prosecutor found evidence to charge Mr. Biden only on the narrow tax and gun issues rather than the broader international conspiracies promoted by Mr. Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill, the agreement was assailed by the right as too lenient.

The agreement came less than two weeks after the Justice Department indicted Mr. Trump on charges that he risked exposing national security secrets and obstructed efforts by the government to reclaim classified documents from him. On Tuesday, Republicans argued that the deal demonstrated a partisan double standard, despite the clear differences in the nature and scope of the cases.

“The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket,’” Mr. Trump proclaimed on his website, Truth Social.

The federal prosecutor who oversaw the inquiry and signed off on the agreement, David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware, set out the terms in a terse public statement that concluded, without elaboration, “The investigation is ongoing.”

A White House spokesman, Ian Sams, said in a statement: “The president and first lady love their son and support him as he continues to rebuild his life. We will have no further comment.”

The crimes to which Mr. Biden is pleading guilty, said Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University and a sentencing expert, are ones that the average person is rarely prosecuted for because they are usually only brought along with more serious offenses.

“If these are the only offenses, most prosecutors are going to say it’s not worth a federal case,” Mr. Berman said. “They would say: Let’s not make a federal case of it for the average person because it’s not worth it to bring a case unless there’s reason to be concerned that there’s a public safety issue or the trust that everyone is treated equally under the law is at stake.”

Mr. Berman said that in this case, federal prosecutors were in a unique situation because the very high-profile defendant was the subject of investigations for a variety of activities. The failure to bring some charges when there is no factual dispute, he said, could create the impression of a two-tiered system of justice.

“Everyone is paying attention, and the facts are not in dispute, so a failure to bring charges would create the perception that there was some sort of special treatment or leniency being given to the president’s son,” Mr. Berman said.

No one questions that Mr. Biden, a 53-year-old Yale-educated lawyer, has had significant personal troubles and pursued a professional path that has intersected with his father’s in ways that have raised ethical issues.

After his father became vice president in 2009, he built relationships with wealthy foreigners that brought in millions of dollars, surfacing concerns inside the Obama administration and among government watchdog groups that he was cashing in on his family name.

He went into a downward spiral after his brother, Beau, died in 2015, becoming addicted to crack cocaine and engaging in tawdry, self-destructive behavior.

As president, Mr. Trump had long sought to tie Hunter Biden’s business deals and personal troubles to his father. Mr. Trump’s first impeachment had its roots in his efforts to persuade the Ukrainian government to help him show wrongdoing in Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, and while in the White House he pressured the Justice Department to investigate.

The Justice Department investigation continued after President Biden took office, under the oversight of Mr. Weiss, the Trump appointee, who was kept on and allowed to finish the inquiry. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has testified to Congress that Mr. Weiss had full authority and independence to decide whether to bring a case against Mr. Biden.

In a letter last month to Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Weiss said that he had been “granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when and whether to file charges.”

While the outcome of the investigation appeared fairly straightforward in the five pages of documents made public on Tuesday, it was the result of a lengthy back-and-forth between Mr. Biden’s lawyers and the Justice Department. The exchange was more akin to the interactions between the government and a major corporation facing a complex investigation.

The discussions started several years ago when Mr. Biden’s lawyers responded to grand jury subpoenas as prosecutors were examining an array of matters, including his dealings with Chinese investors and his work for Burisma, whose board he served on while his father, as vice president, was overseeing the Obama administration’s policy toward Ukraine.

After it was clear that the investigation had narrowed to just the tax and gun issues, slow-moving negotiations ensued. Legal experts said that the use of the diversion agreement to resolve the gun charge was creative, fairly unusual and likely the product of Mr. Weiss wanting to show that the government was refusing to look the other way on behavior that was likely criminal but is rarely prosecuted.

“Hunter will take responsibility for two instances of misdemeanor failure to file tax payments when due pursuant to a plea agreement,” Mr. Clark said in his statement. “A firearm charge, which will be subject to a pretrial diversion agreement and will not be the subject of the plea agreement, will also be filed by the government.”

Mr. Clark continued: “I know Hunter believes it is important to take responsibility for these mistakes he made during a period of turmoil and addiction in his life. He looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward.”

The investigation focused on a particularly chaotic and unseemly period in Hunter Biden’s life when he was addicted to crack cocaine. But the Justice Department went through nearly every major aspect of his life over the past 15 years — a period in which he also struggled to control his alcoholism and engaged in international business deals, which he got into at least in part because of his father’s prominence in politics.

But in the end, the investigation came down to two issues.

One was his taxes. Prosecutors had been considering whether to indict him in connection with his failure to meet filing deadlines for his 2017 and 2018 taxes, and whether he had improperly claimed $30,000 in deductions for business expenses.

In his statement on Tuesday, Mr. Weiss said Mr. Biden had earned more than $1.5 million in each of 2017 and 2018 but failed to file income tax returns despite owing the government more than $100,000 each year. (Mr. Biden paid the overdue tax bill in 2021.)

The second issue was whether Mr. Biden lied on a United States government form that he filled out when he purchased the handgun in 2018. In response to a question on the form about whether he was using drugs, Mr. Biden had said he was not — an assertion that prosecutors suspected might be false based on his erratic behavior at the time and accounts from people who interacted with him.

Under the agreement announced on Tuesday, Mr. Biden will acknowledge that he “possessed a firearm despite knowing he was an unlawful user of and addicted to a controlled substance,” Mr. Weiss’s statement said.

Not long after the purchase of the gun, Beau’s widow, Hallie Biden, with whom Hunter had a romantic relationship at the time, found the weapon in his truck. Fearing he might use the gun to take his own life, Ms. Biden tossed it in a dumpster.

Republicans’ allegations that the elder President Biden’s Justice Department went easy on his son are unlikely to fade away.

In April, an I.R.S. supervisor who had been overseeing the investigation into Hunter Biden hired a lawyer and went to Congress, alleging political favoritism in how the investigation had been handled. Congressional Republicans have pledged to investigate the claims, which have also been referred to inspectors general at the Justice Department and I.R.S.

Reporting was contributed by Seamus Hughes, Reid J. Epstein, Luke Broadwater, Glenn Thrush, Kayla Guo and Jonathan Weisman.

Republicans, claiming a double standard, vow to keep investigating the Bidens.

He and many other Republicans drew a contrast between the charges against Mr. Biden and the 37-count indictment the Justice Department unsealed this month against former President Donald J. Trump on charges that he mishandled highly classified national security documents and lied to and obstructed investigators looking into the matter.

“If you are the president’s leading political opponent, D.O.J. tries to literally put in you jail and give you prison time,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol. “If you are the president’s son, you get a sweetheart deal.”

Mr. Trump is accused of willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and engaging in a conspiracy to obstruct justice — far more serious crimes than the ones for which the younger Mr. Biden was scrutinized.

Leading Democrats argued that bringing any charges at all against the president’s son reflected the independence of the Justice Department, noting that the United States attorney who led the investigation into Hunter Biden, David C. Weiss, was appointed by Mr. Trump.

“This development reflects the Justice Department’s continued institutional independence in following the evidence of actual crimes and enforcing the rule of law even in the face of constant criticism and heckling by my G.O.P. colleagues who think that the system of justice should only follow their partisan wishes,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement.

Still, Mr. McCarthy said the deal should only “enhance” congressional Republicans’ investigation into the Bidens.

Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the Oversight Committee undertaking that inquiry, said he would do just that in a statement calling the charges against Hunter Biden a “slap on the wrist.”

“We will not rest until the full extent of President Biden’s involvement in the family’s schemes are revealed,” said Mr. Comer, who has been looking for evidence of wrongdoing by the president in his inquiry, but has so far failed to unearth any.

Senator Rick Scott of Florida also pushed the idea that the plea deal reflected a politicized Justice Department going easy on Mr. Biden while pursuing Mr. Trump.

“A slap on the wrist for Hunter Biden while ‘The Big Guy’ continues to hunt down his top political opponent,” he wrote on Twitter. “This doesn’t show equal justice. It’s a mockery of our legal system by a family that has no respect for our laws.”

And Senator J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican who announced after Mr. Trump’s indictment that he would block consideration of Biden administration nominees to positions at the Justice Department, said Hunter Biden’s case reinforced his argument.

“This is exhibit 1,402 for why I’m holding Biden’s DOJ nominees,” he wrote on Twitter. “We have a two-tiered justice system in our country. It’s a disgrace.”

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How Trump has tried to use Hunter Biden as a way to attack the president.

It was in the run-up to that campaign that Mr. Trump was first impeached, in 2019, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — charges that stemmed from a phone call Mr. Trump made to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, during which he pressed Mr. Zelensky to investigate leading Democrats and to open an inquiry into Hunter Biden.

Mr. Trump repeatedly circulated unsubstantiated claims in efforts to link his Democratic rival to his son’s business dealings, which he painted as corrupt, even before Mr. Biden became his party’s nominee.

In 2019, Mr. Trump publicly called for China to examine Hunter Biden’s financial dealings in the country. Mr. Trump claimed, without evidence, that Hunter Biden “made millions of dollars from China” and that he used his political connections to persuade China to invest $1.5 billion in a fund he was involved in.

At campaign rallies, Mr. Trump frequently levied claims that Hunter Biden was corrupt, often pointing to a New York Post report about a laptop that was seized by the F.B.I.

And during a presidential debate in October 2020, Mr. Trump repeatedly suggested, without evidence, that Mr. Biden had both served as a consultant and used his former position as vice president to help secure business deals for his son. That series of attacks drew further public scrutiny to Mr. Biden’s son’s activities, as searches for “Hunter Biden” skyrocketed following the exchanges during the debate.

Mr. Trump later called for his attorney general, William P. Barr, to take action against his Democratic challenger for his son’s work, just two weeks before the 2020 election.

Now, with Mr. Trump newly arraigned on federal charges over his handling of classified documents, he and many Republicans have sought to cast Hunter Biden’s agreement with federal prosecutors as overly lenient and sought to establish a double-standard narrative.

Mr. Trump likened Hunter Biden’s charges to that of a “traffic ticket,” in a post on his Truth Social website shortly after the guilty plea was announced on Tuesday.

Who is David C. Weiss, the Trump appointee who led the investigation?

Mr. Weiss was given the authority over whether to bring charges; Merrick B. Garland, the attorney general, had offered assurances that Mr. Weiss would be free to run the investigation.

He worked in the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office during the Bush and Obama administrations before Mr. Trump appointed him to lead it. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and Widener University School of Law, and is a member of the Delaware and Pennsylvania bars.

Both Democrats and Republicans approved of his nomination in 2017.

“David is a career prosecutor and dedicated public servant, longtime Delawarean, and valued member of our law enforcement community,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said in a statement, according to The News-Journal.

Announcing Mr. Weiss’ nomination, Mr. Trump said in a statement in 2017 that he would “share the president’s vision for ‘Making America Safe Again.’”

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The outcome focused attention on whether Hunter Biden got a better deal than the average person would get.

The crimes to which Mr. Biden is pleading guilty, Mr. Berman said, are ones that the average person is rarely prosecuted for because they are usually only brought along with more serious offenses.

In Mr. Biden’s case, they include a charge stemming from lying about drug use on the government form used for his purchase of a handgun. Current and former officials say tens of thousands of Americans, out of the 25 million who buy guns each year, lie on their forms and are not prosecuted.

Prosecutors had pored over Mr. Biden’s finances, including examining two years of unpaid taxes. But in 2021, Mr. Biden paid the I.R.S. the full amount that his accountants estimated he owed, and paid off his liens.

By making the payments, former officials said, Mr. Biden complicated the ability of prosecutors to charge him with tax evasion because juries often question why the government has indicted someone who has paid his taxes. That left prosecutors with the options to charge Mr. Biden with filing his 2017 and 2018 taxes late — something that Mr. Biden’s lawyers argued to prosecutors are often handled without criminal charges and that in this case were handled as misdemeanors.

“If these are the only offenses, most prosecutors are going to say it’s not worth a federal case — they would say: Let’s not make a federal case of it for the average person because it’s not worth it to bring a case unless there’s reason to be concerned that there’s a public safety issue or the trust that everyone is treated equally under the law is at stake,” Mr. Berman said.

Mr. Berman said that in this case, federal prosecutors are in a unique situation because there was a very high-profile defendant who was the subject of investigations for a range of activities. The failure to bring some charges when there is no factual dispute, he said, could create the impression of a two-tiered system of justice.

“Everyone is paying attention and the facts are not in dispute, so a failure to bring charges would create the perception that there was some sort of special treatment or leniency being given to the president’s son,” Mr. Berman.

Trump, and other Republican ’24 contenders, push claims of injustice.

Mr. Trump dismissed the plea deal as a slap on the wrist.

“The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket,’” Mr. Trump proclaimed on his website, Truth Social. “Our system is BROKEN!”

And Mr. DeSantis wrote on Twitter, “If Hunter was not connected to the elite D.C. class he would have been put in jail a long time ago.”

Republicans argued that the plea agreement, in which President Biden’s son pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges with no jail time, in no way evened the scales of justice.

“The Hunter Biden plea deal is a joke,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur-turned-presidential candidate who, among those in the G.O.P. field not named Trump, has most fully embraced the idea that Mr. Trump’s indictment in a case involving his handling of classified documents was purely political. “It’s a feigned retreat and reveals they’re even more scared than ever of scrutiny for the real crimes.”

Even one of Mr. Trump’s biggest critics on the Republican primary campaign trail, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, was hardly putting the matter to rest, bringing up unsubstantiated allegations of bribery that party leaders in the House are pushing hard.

“It is important for our country to have the whistle blower allegations answered, and the U.S. attorney and the Department of Justice should be transparent in stating clearly the status of the investigation; the reason for a 5 year delay in reaching today’s result; and how the investigation will continue and who is leading it?” Mr. Hutchinson said.

Mr. Hutchinson said that if the plea deal closed the books on the earliest charges against Hunter Biden, a new special counsel needs to be named to investigate the latest charges that emerged from the efforts by Rudolph W. Giuliani to dig up dirt on the president in Ukraine.

Democrats unsurprisingly praised the Justice Department’s action as proof positive that unlike the Trump administration, the Biden administration is playing it straight with prosecutions that carry political potency.

“This episode just underscores the integrity of President Biden — he kept Trump’s U.S. attorney on to investigate a matter involving his own son,” read a statement by Facts First USA, a pro-Biden organization backed by organized labor. The group’s president, David Brock, added, “It’s time for Republicans to put this shameless inquisition to bed — America is exhausted by their stunts and ready for them to govern like adults.”

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Here’s the latest on Hunter Biden’s case.

The Justice Department would charge Mr. Biden but agree not to prosecute him in connection with his purchase of a handgun in 2018 during a period when he was using drugs. The deal would be contingent on Mr. Biden remaining drug-free for 24 months and agreeing to never own a firearm again.

• The agreement must still be approved by a federal judge. Mr. Biden is expected to appear in federal court in Delaware in the coming days to be arraigned on the misdemeanor tax charges and plead guilty.

• The president and first lady said little in response to the filing. “The president and first lady love their son and support him as he continues to rebuild his life,” a White House spokesman, Ian Sams, said in a statement. “We will have no further comment.”

• The politics of the case may not be resolved with the guilty plea. Republicans have sought for years to make the case that Hunter Biden committed an array of crimes that should put him behind bars and call into question the honesty of his father.

• Hunter Biden owed more than $100,000 in taxes in each of the two years he did not file, according to the Justice Department, based on taxable income of more than $1.5 million annually.

Hunter Biden’s journey is a complex tale that defies simple narratives.

After his father became vice president, Hunter Biden, a Yale-educated lawyer, forged business relationships with foreign interests that brought him millions of dollars, raised questions about whether he was cashing in on his family name, set off alarms among government officials about potential conflicts of interest, and provided Republicans an opening for years of attacks on his father.

And after the death of his brother, Beau, in 2015, Hunter descended into a spiral of addiction and tawdry and self-destructive behavior.

He is sober now and no longer entangled in foreign business deals. He is a visible presence in his father’s life — his oldest daughter was married at the White House in November, and he attended a state dinner last month.

An examination by The New York Times of the investigation and Hunter Biden’s journey to this juncture, based on interviews with his former business partners, family members and close friends, as well as officials and lawyers familiar with the Justice Department investigation, does not provide either side with the narrative they would prefer.

What emerges is the story of a man battling with personal demons against the background of family tragedy and under the glare of public scrutiny. It is an instructive look at the enduring Washington practice of trading on access and influence.

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