Hunter Biden has been indicted in California on nine criminal charges as part of a Department of Justice investigation into his taxes.
Those charges include three felony counts for alleged tax evasion and filing a false return and six misdemeanor charges for alleged failure to pay taxes between 2016 and 2019.
Special counsel David Weiss had previously convened a federal grand jury in Los Angeles to gather testimony and evidence on potential criminal tax charges.
“Hunter Biden engaged in a four-year scheme in which he chose not to pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019 and to evade the assessment of taxes for tax year 2018 when he filed false returns,” prosecutors wrote in a press release on Thursday evening.
If Biden were convicted on all charges, he would face up to 17 years in prison.
District judge Maryellen Noreika had previously rejected a plea deal that would have seen the younger Biden plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax violations and submit to a pre-trial diversion agreement to avoid a felony gun charge in exchange for broad immunity from future prosecution. Noreika then dismissed the two outstanding misdemeanor tax charges at the request of federal prosecutors, who hoped to pursue new charges.
In September, Weiss indicted Biden on three firearms charges, alleging that Hunter lied on a federal form while purchasing a gun five years ago.
That four-page indictment, filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware, argues that Hunter “knowingly made a false and fictitious written statement, intended and likely to deceive” a dealer in his effort to acquire a Colt Cobra revolver in October 2018.
The indictment accused Hunter of falsely certifying that he was “not an unlawful user of, and addicted to, any stimulant, narcotic drug, and any other controlled substance,” when he filled out a federal Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms form.
Biden wrote in his memoir that he was smoking crack nearly every 15 minutes around the time he purchased the gun.
Biden pleaded not guilty to those charges.
The new charges come after whistleblowers raised concerns that the investigation into the younger Biden had been plagued by “preferential treatment and politics.”
IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley previously testified that, before Weiss was appointed as special counsel, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney for D.C. had final say over whether charges would be brought against Hunter Biden. Shapley claimed the Biden appointee was the one who made the call not to charge the younger Biden with a felony previously.
Shapley, who worked as an IRS investigator for over ten years and oversaw the agency’s tax investigation into Hunter Biden, told the House Oversight Committee that despite Weiss’s claiming that he had ultimate authority over the investigation that in fact D.C. U.S. attorney Matthew Graves was in charge.
“After U.S. Attorney for D.C. Matthew Graves, appointed by President Biden, refused to bring charges, I watched Mr. Weiss tell a room full of senior FBI and IRS investigators on October 7, 2022, that he was ‘not the deciding person on whether charges are filed,’” Shapley said.
Graves’s wife, Fatima Gross Graves, has visited the White House at least 28 times since Biden took office. In the first three months of 2023 alone, Graves, a vocal liberal activist, visited the White House ten times.
Shapley also said Lesley Wolf, a top prosecutor on the Hunter Biden investigation, stood in the way of investigators’ efforts.
Shapley told the committee earlier this year that investigators sought to search the Bidens’ Delaware residence in connection with the Hunter Biden tax probe because the younger Biden had spent significant time there. But Wolf, an assistant U.S. attorney in Delaware, allegedly warned investigators to consider the optics of performing such an investigation, Shapley said, though investigators believed there was a significant chance they would find incriminating evidence in the home.
“Lesley Wolf told us there was more than enough probable cause for the physical search warrant there,” Shapley testified, “but the question was whether the juice was worth the squeeze.”
He said Wolf told the team during a September 2020 meeting that “optics were a driving factor in the decision on whether to execute a search warrant. She said a lot of evidence in our investigation would be found in the guest house of former Vice President Biden, but said there is no way we will get that approved.”
Shapley said Wolf also let the younger Biden’s lawyers know that investigators had probable cause to search his North Virginia storage unit, a tip-off that would give him an opportunity to remove evidence ahead of the search.
“The IRS prepared an affidavit in support of a search warrant for the unit in December 2020, but . . . Wolf once again objected,” Shapley said.
Weiss told the Judiciary Committee in closed-door testimony that Wolf is “an excellent lawyer” and a “person of integrity.” He claimed political concerns did not shape her decisions.