Judge Mark Scarsi, a district judge in California’s Central district, pushed back Wednesday on Hunter Biden’s lawyer’s argument to have his tax case thrown out of court.
Scarsi did not make a ruling on the motion to dismiss, but said he would deliver one by April 17. Hunter will go on trial on June 20, 2024, the judge ruled in January.
Special Counsel David Weiss indicted the president’s son on nine tax violations, which include failing to file tax returns and inflating his business expenses, along with underestimating his income.
The tax case is the second legal situation facing Hunter. He was indicted for gun violations in Delaware. He is also a key witness in the House impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
Abbe Lowell, Hunter’s attorney, tried to convince the judge that Biden’s Justice Department targeted him selectively, but the judge said during the hearing that “there is no evidence that influenced the prosecutors’ decision here.”
The judge asked Lowell if he could provide evidence that an alleged “political circus building around” Hunter “forced the Justice Department’s hand” to prosecute the president’s son, Politico reported:
“I don’t have transparency,” Lowell replied, arguing he could not divine the prosecutors’ motives. “What I have is the type of evidence that [a prosecutor] goes to a jury with every week and says ‘you can connect the dots.’”
Scarsi pushed back, asking plainly “is there evidence that pressure from outside entity influenced the prosecution?” The defense’s argument, he noted, rested on a timeline detailing the political clamor surrounding Biden in the months leading to the Justice Department’s decision to file new charges.
“It’s a timeline, but it’s a juicy timeline,” Lowell responded, pointing to Weiss being hauled in front of Congress to testify, among other milestones.
Hunter could face a maximum of 17 years in prison if convicted. In total, the president’s son faces 42 years in federal prison for the nine tax and three gun charges.
Many Republicans, including House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY), believe Weiss’ tax indictment did not go far enough. “We believe there’s significantly more tax liability than what he has,” Comer previously told Fox News.
He continued:
We also know that there’s money laundering, we get that from all the suspicious activity reports. Most of the 170 suspicious activity reports at Treasury implied that the Bidens were money laundering and from what we can look at with their bank statements now and the research we’ve done, I can confirm it sure looks like money laundering to me.
“You also have the obvious violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and who was he lobbying for? He was lobbying for China, Russia and some of the worst countries on the world,” Comer said. “But also, he was lobbying his father, so that makes Joe Biden liable in Foreign Agent Registration Act liability. So we’ve got a lot of concerns here. This is the tip of the iceberg. I’m not surprised it happened before this week, but this case is far from being over.”
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
