Hunter Biden joined his family on stage this week in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, where President Biden gave his acceptance speech and the crowd roared, “Thank you, Joe.”
A more serious trial began Wednesday in Los Angeles as a federal judge held the final hearing before Hunter Biden’s criminal trial on tax evasion and fraud charges, which was scheduled to begin on September 5.
The president’s son, who lives in Malibu, was not present in court. The 54-year-old stayed with the rest of the Biden clan, including his father, on a family vacation more than 100 miles north at the Santa Ynez Valley estate of businessman and Democratic Party donor Joe Kiani.
In his absence, prosecutors and his defense team, led by veteran prosecutor Mark Geragos, argued fiercely over what jurors will hear — and what they won’t — about the younger Biden’s tumultuous, drug-fueled life from 2016 until he got sober in 2019.
At one point, Geragos accused federal prosecutors of “character assassination” for trying to limit what the defense could tell jurors about Hunter Biden’s addiction and what caused it.
“They want to slim him down,” Geragos said. “Because that’s the whole point — to make him look bad” and set up “a good, typical independent counsel-style prosecution.”
The president’s son faced a new trial in June after a Delaware jury found him guilty of illegally buying a gun. Both charges were intended to fuel attacks by former President Trump and his allies on the Bidens in the run-up to the November election. But Joe Biden’s decision last month to withdraw from the race changed that calculus.
The gist of the case now brought by prosecutors is that the president’s son failed to file a tax return and paid his taxes on time, and that when he filed in 2020, he was guilty of, among other things, aggravated tax evasion by misclassifying personal expenses, including college expenses. tuition for his children and $30,000 for a pornographic website in business expenses.
The “centerpiece” of the defense’s case is how the trauma changed Hunter Biden’s life, triggering his addiction and leading to a particularly unruly period when he lived in luxury hotels in LA and abused crack cocaine around the clock.
And so Geragos resented efforts by prosecutors to prevent or limit his team from talking about the 1972 car accident of Hunter Biden’s mother and sister or the 2015 death of his brother from brain cancer.
“They’re creating a portrait for the jury of someone who was down in West Hollywood and just decided to party and do cocaine like he didn’t have a care in the world,” Geragos said. He said the “skewed” result erased key context and was “really a form of character assassination for the prosecution”.
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U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, who was appointed to the bench by then-President Trump, seemed unmoved.
“I don’t know that there is good evidence as to what causes the addiction,” the judge said, asking, “Why does the cause of Mr. Biden’s addiction matter?”
Prosecutors agreed, arguing that early life trauma, however horrific, was not part of the case.
“No matter how many drugs you do, you don’t suddenly forget that when you make $11 million, you have to pay taxes,” Assistant US Atty. Leo Wise said.
During the hearing, which lasted more than three hours, Scarsi mostly sided with prosecutors, barring Hunter Biden’s lawyers from calling an addiction expert to testify and telling jurors that the president’s son eventually paid off his tax debt and fines with a debt loan. LA attorney Kevin Morris.
If any attorney violates the judge’s rules about what evidence is barred from the trial, Scarsi promised “six-figure penalties” and said he has no qualms about overturning the conviction or declaring a mistrial.
The hearing confirmed how much the trial will be a follow-up to June’s trial in Delaware, in which the younger Biden was found guilty of three felonies for lying about drug use when he bought and briefly possessed a handgun.
Read more: Hometown jury to decide Hunter Biden’s fate: ‘It’s time to end this case’
The tax case looks at a similar period through a different prism: where Hunter Biden’s income came from, how he spent it, and ultimately how he reported it all to the IRS.
Prosecutors said they plan to call fewer than 30 witnesses, including Hunter Biden’s girlfriend from 2018, who was sent to clean hotel rooms littered with his crack cocaine paraphernalia. Streamray porn site, where the younger Biden spent $30,000 – employee also testifies, prosecutors said.
Noting that Morris also paid for Hunter Biden’s lavish lifestyle, including a rental home, a Porsche, a security detail and a crisis team, Wise said there was no plan to call the Hollywood lawyer on the witness stand.
But the argument over whether and how the defense could bring up the tragedies that defined the younger Biden’s life continued until the end, with Geragos saying it was “fair game” to bring up the deaths of Hunter Biden’s mother and siblings if the defendant takes the witness stand. to stand up.
“I think the accident is still out of bounds,” Wise said, referring to the 1972 car crash. “How the defendant could say it caused it 40 years later is wildly” outside the case.
Geragos ripped into the prosecutor: “More power to Mr. Wise that he’s never had anyone close to him with a substance abuse problem.”
Wise, his face visibly reddened, stood up and asked, Can’t we talk about me?
Scarsi ultimately determined that there was no “causal connection” between Hunter Biden’s past traumatic events and addiction to the case, nor to the deaths of his mother and sister. The judge said the death of his brother Beau in 2015 could be cited, but not as a reason for his addiction.
“The court’s decision is that it’s too far,” Scarsi said, adding that “jury sympathy” would be the “only” reason for its introduction.
Times writer Laura Nelson contributed to this report.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
