By James Lynch | AMAC Outside Contributor
The federal judge who presided over Hunter Biden’s criminal tax case scolded Joe Biden for claiming his son was the victim of selective prosecution when announcing his pardon for Hunter’s tax and gun crimes.
Judge Mark Scarsi issued an order Tuesday night acknowledging Hunter Biden’s pardon and strongly rebuked Biden’s assertion that his son was the victim of selective prosecution.
“The President’s statement illustrates the reasons for the Court’s disapproval, as representations contained therein stand in tension with the case record. For example, the President asserts that Mr. Biden ‘was treated differently’ from others ‘who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions,’ implying that Mr. Biden was among those individuals who untimely paid taxes due to addiction,” Scarsi said.
The judge pointed out that Hunter Biden said in court filings he was addicted to drugs and alcohol through May 2019, and in his guilty plea on tax-evasion charges admitted to dodging tax payments after becoming sober.
Hunter Biden pleaded guilty in September to nine federal tax charges for being unable to pay over $1.4 million of taxes in a timely manner last decade, despite making over $7 million and receiving considerable financial support from entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris. The younger Biden also faced charges for filing false tax forms and failing to file tax forms, in part because he fraudulently deducted personal expenses as business expenses.
“And Mr. Biden admitted that he ‘had sufficient funds available to him to pay some or all of his outstanding taxes when they were due,’ but that he did not make payments toward his tax liabilities even ‘well after he had regained his sobriety,’ instead electing to ‘spen[d] large sums to maintain his lifestyle’ in 2020,” Scarsi observed.
Hunter Biden’s lavish lifestyle was characterized by an addiction to crack cocaine, affairs with multiple women, and non-stop partying in the Los Angeles area and elsewhere. He largely financed that lifestyle through overseas business dealings involving entities from Ukraine, China, Romania, and other countries during and after his father’s vice presidency. Hunter Biden and his business associates received $27 million from foreign sources over a five-year period last decade, House Republicans determined during the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.
In a statement Sunday night, Joe Biden argued that his son was the subject of selective prosecution by the Justice Department because of political pressure. Scarsi and Delaware federal judge Maryellen Noreika, who oversaw Hunter Biden’s gun conviction in June, both dismissed those arguments in pretrial motions.
“But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President,” Scarsi noted.
“And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people,” he continued.
“The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States,” he added, “but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.”
Scarsi also took time to admonish Hunter Biden for transmitting the pardon improperly by transmitting a White House press release instead of having an executive agency formally send it over. Once Scarsi receives the official pardon, he will terminate Biden’s upcoming sentencing hearing for the tax charges and dismiss the case in accordance with the pardon.
Joe Biden pardoned his son for all crimes he “may have committed” from January 1, 2014 to December 1, 2024, an 11 year period that covers the tax and gun offenses Biden was going to be sentenced for later this month. The time period coincides with the beginning of Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which added him to its board in spring 2014 as his father ran the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy agenda.
Many Republicans and some Democrats have criticized Joe Biden for pardoning his son after insisting for months that he would not do so and respect the outcome of his son’s legal proceedings. Joe Biden and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre have claimed that he came to the decision over the weekend to grant the pardon.
Donald Trump’s legal team is already using Biden’s criticism of his own Justice Department to their advantage in the president elect’s hush-money case, arguing that the case should be tossed given that it was prosecuted by a Justice Department that, by the president’s own admission, is unreliable.
Biden’s claim that Hunter was “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted” and “treated differently” amount to an “extraordinary condemnation of President Biden’s own DOJ,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
“As President Biden put it yesterday, ‘Enough is enough.’ This case, which should never have been brought, must now be dismissed.”
