News outlets this morning zeroed in on the surprise news that Hunter Biden intended to accept a guilty verdict in his federal tax fraud case, just as trial was scheduled to begin in Los Angeles.
The president’s son will submit an Alford plea, his attorney, Abbe Lowell, told the court this morning, per CNN and other outlets. Under the terms of that plea, Biden would still maintain that he is innocent, but would accept the guilty verdict.
Biden was charged with three tax felonies and six misdemeanors over the failure to pay taxes, tax evasion and filing of a false return. Prosecutors claim that he failed to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes over a period from 2016 to 2019, when they said that he instead “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle.”
The trial was expected to delve into Biden’s years of drug abuse. Those details also emerged in a separate federal trial last summer on gun charges. In June, a Wilmington, DE jury found him guilty on three felony counts related to the purchase of a gun in 2018.
The case likely would have been at the center of the fall presidential campaign, as Republicans have for years sought to tie President Joe Biden to his son’s business dealings. But the relevance of Hunter Biden’s trial has, obviously, greatly diminished since the president dropped out of the race.
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