Hunter Biden's attorneys claimed they "never tried to mislead" in a legal motion Sunday despite incorrect wording that cuts favorably toward their client, The Hill reported. A federal judge threatened them with sanctions after attorneys used "false statements" in an attempt to get Biden's California case tossed.
The president's son is headed for trial in California in the coming months on charges of tax evasion. Biden is accused of failing to pay his federal taxes, totaling $1.4 million, from 2016 to 2019 and of filing false returns in 2018.
He supposedly used the proceeds to fuel his hedonistic lifestyle fueled by drugs and alcohol during that time and faces misdemeanor tax charges and nine felonies. In an effort to get Biden off the hook, his attorneys claimed that Biden was never charged until U.S. Attorney David Weiss was appointed special counsel.
This was an effort to have his trial tossed based on Weiss's appointment, similar to a decision in favor of former President Donald Trump with the same rationale. The judge dismissed Trump's classified documents case in Florida after finding that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith was invalid.
U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi reprimanded Biden's legal team for their incorrect assertion about when charges were filed and said they must "show cause why sanctions should not be imposed for making false statements in the motion." Biden's attorneys responded that they "never tried to mislead" the court.
"Defense counsel, perhaps inartfully, intended this use of the word ‘charges’ to refer to the current charges brought by indictment against Mr. Biden, not the lack of any charges at all. Here, context matters," his attorneys wrote.
However, it seems clear from their own words that they meant exactly what they wrote in the filing. "As U.S. Attorney, he had years to bring whatever charges he believed were merited, but he brought no charges until after he received the Special Counsel title that he sought," the incorrectly wrote about Weiss.
The judge pointed out last week that Weiss had charged Biden before being appointed as the special counsel. The attorneys for Biden have pledged to change the wording in the motion to reflect "indictments" instead of "charges" to clarify the supposed error.
They pleaded with the court to overlook the error rather than sanction them. "Nevertheless, there is no basis on which to sanction Mr. Biden’s counsel for using that one word, which was not misleading in the context in which the two prior Informations had been repeatedly addressed with the Court," the attorneys said in the motion.
It's difficult to see how Biden's lawyers could have made such an error about whether Weiss charged him before becoming special counsel. Before he was appointed, Weiss brokered the infamous sweetheart deal with Biden, Fox News reported.
In July 2023, Biden was facing felony tax charges and a felony gun charge when Weiss offered him a deal that would include no jail time. He would be able to go through a diversion program to get the gun charge dropped and just plead guilty to the tax charges.
Biden would have gotten away with it, except that Judge Maryellen Noreika of the United States District Court for the District of Delaware declined to accept the plea deal. She called it "not standard," "different from what I normally see," and unconstitutional.
By August 2023, Weiss was named special prosecutor on Biden's case. If unintentional, this kind of oversight in the timeline by Biden's attorney would be, at the very least, quite sloppy.
Because he's the son of President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden has been able to escape the consequences of his actions for a long time. That seems to be coming to an end for him despite the best efforts of his attorneys.
