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LOS ANGELES (CN) — President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges he failed to pay taxes over millions of dollars in income he received working for a Ukrainian natural gas conglomerate and a Chinese private equity fund.
Biden, 53, made his first appearance in federal court in downtown Los Angeles where special counsel David Weiss filed the indictment after a plea deal fell apart last year. The younger Biden faces separate firearms-related charges in Delaware to which he has pleaded not guilty as well.
U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, a Donald Trump appointee, set a trial date for June 20.
“Not guilty,” Biden answered when the judge asked him how he was pleading.
In an unusual proceeding, Biden’s initial appearance and arraignment, which normally take place before a magistrate judge, were handled by Scarsi in combination with a status conference to set a schedule in order, as the judge said, to streamline the proceedings. Scarsi set the same conditions for pretrial release as the judge in Delaware had.
Biden told the judge that he understood that if he violated these conditions, which include abstaining from alcohol and illegal drug use, he could be sent to prison to await trial.
Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell has said the tax charges are politically motivated and that Biden has paid all the money he owed the IRS. At Thursday’s hearing, Lowell indicated that he may seek an evidentiary hearing, as he has in Delaware, regarding the prosecutorial decisionmaking.
“This case is sui generis,” Lowell told the judge. “It’s an unusual situation.”
The president’s son was hit with three felony and six misdemeanor charges in December, with prosecutors saying he failed to file and pay taxes, filed a false or fraudulent tax return and evaded a tax assessment.
According to the indictment, Biden, engaged in a four-year scheme to avoid paying at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes owed for 2016 through 2019, and he evaded the assessment of taxes for 2018 when he filed false returns in February 2020.
He “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills,” the indictment says.
Between 2016 and Oct. 15, 2020, according to the charges, Biden received more than $7 million in total gross income. The money came from Burisma Holdings — the Ukrainian conglomerate for which he served as board member — from an unidentified business associate with whom Biden purportedly helped a Romanian businessperson fight corruption charges and from his involvement with the Chinese private equity venture.
In addition, prosecutors say an entertainment lawyer and personal friend of Biden provided him with $200,000 in 2020 to rent a “lavish” house on a canal in the trendy Venice neighborhood in LA as well as $11,000 in payments for Biden’s Porsche. In total, this friend paid $1.2 million to third parties on Biden’s behalf, the indictment said.
Biden, whose legal problems have been fodder for Republican lawmakers and pundits to discredit his father’s administration, faces three federal weapons charges in Delaware, to which he pleaded not guilty in October.
The weapons and the tax charges came after a plea agreement with federal prosecutors was rejected by a federal judge. Biden had agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges and would have avoided prosecution on the gun charges provided he stay out of trouble for two years.
After the plea deal fell apart, prosecutors dismissed the pending tax charges and indicted Biden in Delaware on the gun charges, claiming he lied about his drug use in October 2018 on a form to buy a gun. The dismissed tax charges were resurrected in December’s indictment.
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