The historic indictment of the son of a sitting president comes after a plea deal that might have ended a yearslong probe into Hunter Biden fell apart and just as House Republicans have launched an impeachment inquiry to seek bank records and other documents from the president and his son.
The case is being overseen by special counsel David Weiss, who also headed the investigation. Weiss is a Trump appointee who was kept on as the U.S. attorney for Delaware because of the sensitive and unique nature of the investigation into a president’s son by the Justice Department, a part of the executive branch headed by the president. Attorney General Merrick Garland named Weiss special counsel last month as negotiations over the tax and gun charges collapsed.
The White House referred requests for comment to the Justice Department and Hunter Biden’s legal team.
Weiss declined to comment on the investigation Thursday before the indictment was unsealed.
An attorney for Hunter Biden, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement that the new charges were politically influenced and are unwarranted. “We believe these charges are barred by the agreement the prosecutors made with Mr. Biden, the recent rulings by several federal courts that this statute is unconstitutional, and the facts that he did not violate that law, and we plan to demonstrate all of that in court,” Lowell said.
In an interview with CNN on Thursday evening, Lowell said he believed there was “ambiguity in the statute” under which Biden was charged.
“The law says whether or not the person is possessing the gun while they are addicted,” he told host Erin Burnett. “There is ambiguity in the statute, which we will have to pursue if this case continues. At the time that he purchased this gun, I don’t think there’s evidence that that’s when he was suffering. When you refer to his book, he had just come out of rehabilitation.”
Weiss’ investigation was opened in 2018, the year before Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president, said a source familiar with the inquiry, and it focused on the younger Biden’s finances.
The two sides in July reached a plea agreement that called for Biden to plead guilty in Delaware federal court to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes in return for prosecutors’ recommending probation. A separate felony gun charge of illegally owning the Colt Cobra .38 Special handgun would have been dropped in two years if Biden honored the terms of what is known as a diversion agreement.
The plea agreement started to fall apart at the court appearance where it was expected to be finalized after the judge presiding over the case raised questions about some details. “The agreements are not straightforward, and they contain some atypical provisions,” U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika said, including one that could theoretically protect Biden from other tax-related crimes in the same period.
