Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden, attends a Medal of Honor Ceremony in the East Room at the White House in Washington on July 3, 2024 (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA/ AP Images).
Lawyers for Hunter Biden maintain that the judge in his federal tax prosecution should bar the Special Counsel’s Office from wading in the waters of political intrigue, as mention of his foreign business dealings and “so-called improper political influence and/or corruption” would be a “sideshow” that would lead to a “mini-trial within the trial,” would confuse the jury just like journalists have been “confused,” and would possibly mean he cannot get a fair trial.
The response Monday, led by Mark Geragos, was geared towards convincing U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, a Donald Trump appointee who recently threatened to sanction the defense for “a lack of candor” in a court filing, that special counsel David Weiss and prosecutors on his team are trying to inject “irrelevant and politically-charged material” into a willful failure to pay taxes case that can be supported by evidence of “IRS filings, bank statements, and the government agents’ testimony,” or, in the alternative, a Biden stipulation to the “amount and timing of the income he received” in 2017.
The government has alleged from the start that Biden “engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019,” years when he was paid to be on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, earned income by “deal-making” with a Chinese private equity fund, and “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle at the same time he chose not to pay his taxes.”
Just last week, prosecutors told Scarsi that while they wouldn’t accuse Biden of failing to register as a foreign agent and wouldn’t allege that he “improperly coordinated with the Obama Administration” while his father, President Joe Biden, was vice president, they do want to want tell jurors about an oral agreement, made with Business Associates 1 and 2, to be paid over a million dollars by Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian real estate “tycoon” who faced a corruption probe and hoped that Obama administration could “cause an end” to that investigation.
The agreement, Weiss said, appeared to be geared towards providing real estate management services but “concealed the true nature of the work” — an “attempt to influence U.S. government agencies” by reaching out to the U.S. State Department. That, prosecutors argued, showed Biden’s “state of mind and intent during the relevant tax years charged in the indictment” — making the references fair game, since the government didn’t “intend” to introduce evidence that the defendant “received compensation for actions taken by his father that impacted national or international politics.”
The defense has since responded that the referencing “so-called improper political influence and/or corruption” is anything but fair game and will “insinuate extraneous, politically-charged matters into the trial which have no relevance to the tax offenses Mr. Biden is accused of.”
Citing the response from the media to the special counsel’s filing, the defense argued that if journalists “closely following the case are confused,” the jury to be seated is “sure to be as well.” In addition, the details would tend to echo “false allegations of foreign wrongdoing” that Republican lawmakers have made against the Bidens, and would jeopardize the defendant’s ability to get a fair trial, the filing said.
“The Special Counsel’s showcasing of these matters on the eve of Mr. Biden’s trial—when there is no mention of political influence in the 56-page Indictment—is not presented for a proper purpose,” the defense responded. “The Special Counsel’s unnecessary change of tactic merely echoes the baseless and false allegations of foreign wrongdoing which have been touted by House Republicans to use Mr. Biden’s proper business activities in Romania and elsewhere to attack him and his father.”
“The Court should not allow a side show in which issues far beyond the charges have to be explained and litigated in a tax case,” Biden’s lawyers continued. “Disallowing this unnecessary detour will ensure that Mr. Biden, like any other person accused, gets the fair trial that he deserves.”
If the judge does allow it, the defense said, then the jury “will simply be left with the impression Mr. Biden did something wrong, even if that is irrelevant to the actual tax charges they must decide.”
Weiss is also inviting the creation of a “mini-trial within the trial” that would “distract the jury from the core issues,” the defense added.
According to Weiss, Popoviciu paid Business Associate 1’s “legal entity” $3,101,258, a third of which would go to Biden, even after the business associate and Biden “were concerned lobbying work might cause political ramifications for the defendant’s father.”
In one footnote, the defense made the case that Popoviciu’s involvement was “wholly irrelevant” since “no funds flowed directly to Mr. Biden from any such foreign principal.”
Read the response here.
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