Hunter Biden on Thursday offered a surprise plea in a last-minute gambit shortly before the start of his trial on tax charges to avoid the ordeal and expense that a weekslong public airing of his past misdeeds would entail.
A half-hour before jury selection began, a lawyer for Mr. Biden in the case, Abbe Lowell, entered a so-called Alford plea, acknowledging there was enough evidence to convict him even as he professed innocence toward the same charges.
The maneuver, named after a Supreme Court decision, is typically used to jump-start stalled plea negotiations, postpone a proceeding or avoid a trial altogether by leapfrogging straight to the sentencing process.
It is not clear if Judge Mark C. Scarsi, a Trump appointee who is presiding over the case, will accept the plea. He immediately recessed the case for two hours to give prosecutors a chance to respond, but he also indicated that he was still prepared to proceed with interviewing 120 jurors before the end of the week.
“The court wants to stay out of plea discussions,” Judge Scarsi said after prosecutors opposed the plea.
Lawyers representing Mr. Biden, the president’s son, believe that David C. Weiss, the special counsel in the case, had refused to engage in serious plea negotiations after being sharply criticized for signing a generous agreement with Mr. Biden on gun and tax charges that would have resulted in no prison time.
That agreement imploded during a chaotic hearing at the federal courthouse in Wilmington in July 2023, and Mr. Weiss subsequently indicted Mr. Biden on charges of lying on a firearms application in Delaware and on a range of tax violations in California, where he now lives.
The Justice Department sets a high bar for accepting Alford pleas. Its procedural guidebook mandates that they be rejected “except in the most unusual circumstances” — and then only after being approved by senior department leaders.
If the court rejects the Alford plea, Mr. Biden’s lawyers would be at a crossroads: They could simply plead guilty to avoid the trial, or proceed with preparations for what promises to be a grueling and costly public spectacle that might produce the same negative outcome.
People close to Mr. Biden say he is desperately seeking a way to avoid dragging his family into the humiliation of a second trial three months after his conviction on gun charges in Delaware. He is particularly concerned about the possibility that his daughters Naomi and Maisy would be called to testify, they added.
He is charged with evading a tax assessment, failing to file and pay taxes, and filing a false or fraudulent tax return.
The trial on tax charges in Los Angeles turned into a political afterthought the moment President Biden withdrew from the 2024 race in July. But the personal stakes for his son, who is staring down the possibility of prison time, have never been higher.
House Republicans had once seen Mr. Biden’s legal troubles as a key element in their plan to undermine his father’s standing with voters. But their exhaustive attempts to prove that the son and the father conspired to create a “Biden crime family” never materialized, and prosecutors have made it clear that the California case will not include evidence of official wrongdoing by President Biden when he was vice president.
In recent weeks, Hunter Biden’s team has been in regular communication with Mr. Weiss’s team over procedural matters, but there have been no indications that the two sides are close to a plea agreement.
Mr. Biden already faces a maximum of 25 years on the gun conviction, although his sentence is likely to be much lower as a first-time felon who has been clean and sober for several years. Mr. Biden faces up to 17 years behind bars if he is convicted of the charges that he evaded federal taxes on millions in income from foreign businesses when he was addicted to drugs and alcohol.
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