FILE – Hunter Biden arrives at the O’Neill House office building for a closed briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington on February 28, 2024. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Hunter Biden is expected to ask a federal judge in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday to delay his trial on tax charges until September.
The son of President Joe Biden is currently scheduled to appear in federal court in Los Angeles before US District Judge Mark Scarce on June 20 on nine federal tax charges for allegedly refusing to pay taxes.
His attorneys are expected to argue that the tax trial should be delayed until Sept. 5, citing scheduling conflicts with Biden’s unrelated gun case in Delaware in two weeks.
Scarci previously said he wanted “to proceed with the trial without significant interruption.”
Prosecutors from the Office of Special Counsel David Weiss said the request to postpone the tax trial for three months should not be granted.
The president’s son was indicted back in December on nine federal tax charges.
Hunter Biden, 54, of Malibu, “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his taxes,” the indictment said.
He faces three felony counts, including tax evasion, and six misdemeanor counts of failure to pay taxes.
Last week, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals denied the younger Biden’s request to reinstate the charges against him.
Hunter Biden’s attorneys wrote in a legal filing that they believe the tax case was filed “in direct response to political pressure.”
The attorneys wrote that the defendant paid his taxes, plus fines, to the government.
In October, the president’s son pleaded not guilty in Wilmington, Delaware, to three charges related to lying on a federal uniform, purchasing a Colt Cobra firearm in 2018 and being an illegal drug user.
Regarding the tax charges, the 56-page indictment states that between 2016 and October 15, 2020, “the defendant spent the money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rentals, exotic cars, clothing and other items. Personal nature, in short, everything except his taxes.”
The Delaware case alleges that Hunter Biden violated laws against gun-toting drug users in 2018. In July, he agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax counts and admitted to a firearms violation without a conviction and served no jail time. But the deal collapsed when a judge questioned its terms and refused to sign off on it.
His attorney, Abe Lowell, said in a statement when the tax charges were announced that “based on the facts and the law, if Hunter’s last name had been anything other than Biden, (the previously announced firearms) charge would not have been brought in Delaware and now in California.”
Lowell said: “Now, after a five-year investigation with no new evidence — and two years after Hunter paid the bills in full — the U.S. attorney has filed nine new charges when he agreed to settle the matter with the couple just months ago. on misdemeanors”.
Described in the indictment as a Georgetown- and Yale-educated lawyer, lobbyist, consultant and businessman, Hunter Biden served on the boards of a Ukrainian industrial conglomerate and a Chinese private equity fund at the time of the tax charges.
“He negotiated and executed contracts and agreements for business and legal services that paid millions of dollars in compensation to him and/or his local corporations, Owasco PC and Owasco LLC,” the indictment states.
In addition to his business interests, the defendant was an employee of a multinational law firm, the document said.
In a now-discarded plea deal in Delaware, Biden said he forgot to pay taxes during the time he was in the grip of a drug addiction.
