LOS ANGELES (CN) — Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, agreed to plead guilty at the start of a trial Thursday to charges he failed to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes over a four-year period during which he says he was severely addicted to alcohol and drugs.
Biden's attorney Abbe Lowell had initially sought a so-called Alford plead under which Biden would admit that the prosecution has sufficient evidence for a jury to find them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt while still protesting their innocence.
However, after Lowell couldn't get the Justice Department lawyers to agree to this arrangement, he told U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, a Donald Trump appointee, on Thursday afternoon that his client was ready to enter an open plea to three felony and six misdemeanor charges.
"We will not accept an Alford plea," federal prosecutor Leo Wise told Scarsi earlier today at the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. "It's against the public interest — it's an injustice."
The judge, who earlier this year rejected Biden's argument that he was the victim of selective prosecution, agreed to accept the plea but had Wise read the entire 55-page indictment out loud in court to have a factual basis to which Biden would admit.
Scarsi set a sentencing date for Dec. 16. Although Biden, 54, faces a maximum prison sentence of 17 years, it's very unlikely that the judge will sentence him to anything close to that.
Biden has already one conviction under his belt after a federal jury convicted him in June on three counts related to the illegal purchase of a gun in 2018. The jurors agreed that Biden knowingly lied about his illegal drug use on the forms he filled out to buy the revolver.
Both the tax and firearm cases are prosecuted by Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware who was appointed last year by Attorney General Merrick Garland to lead the investigation of Biden after a plea agreement that would have spared him prison fell apart.
The younger Biden has been a favorite target of Republican politicians and pundits who have tried to tarnish the Biden administration with his personal and legal trouble. The widely repeated accusation that an Ukrainian industrial conglomerate had paid millions in bribes to both the president and his son turned out to be bogus, however, after an FBI informer was charged with making up the story to discredit Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election.
The president's son was hit with three felony and six misdemeanor charges in December, with prosecutors saying he failed to file and pay taxes, filed a false or fraudulent tax return and evaded a tax assessment.
According to the indictment, Biden, engaged in a four-year scheme to avoid paying at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes owed for 2016 through 2019, and he evaded the assessment of taxes for 2018 when he filed false returns in February 2020.
He "spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills," prosecutors say.
The indictment that Wise read in court contained a long list of extravagant hotel bills in LA and Beverly Hills, payments to strippers and for membership to a sex club that Biden claimed as business expenses to lower his taxable income while he went on a months-long drug and alcohol binge in 2018. The indictment cited Biden's own words from his memoir regarding his out-of-control lifestyle during this period.
Between 2016 and Oct. 15, 2020, according to the charges, Biden saw more than $7 million in total gross income. The money came from Burisma Holdings — the Ukrainian conglomerate for which he served as board member — as well as from an unidentified business associate who with Biden purportedly helped a Romanian businessperson fight corruption charges and from his involvement with a Chinese private equity venture.
In addition, prosecutors say an entertainment lawyer and personal friend of Biden provided him with $200,000 in 2020 to rent a "lavish" house on a canal in the trendy Venice neighborhood in LA as well as $11,000 in payments for Biden's Porsche. In total, this friend paid $1.2 million to third parties on Biden's behalf, the indictment says.
After regaining his sobriety in 2020, Biden said, he filed his outstanding tax returns and he paid his outstanding taxes with interest and penalties in 2021.
Mark Geragos, the celebrity attorney who recently joined Biden's defense team, had said during a pretrial hearing last month that Biden's struggles with addiction will be the "centerpiece of the defense." Whereas prosecutors would seek to paint Biden as a hedonistic party boy, Geragos said he planned to tell the jury that Biden was in the "throes of addiction" to drugs and alcohol.
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