LOS ANGELES (AP) — Weeks before Hunter Biden goes on trial on federal tax charges, the legal team for President Joe Biden’s son and prosecutors appear in a California courtroom Wednesday as a judge considers what evidence can be presented to the jury.
Hunter Biden is accused of scheming to avoid paying at least $1.4 million in taxes in the case that goes to trial in Los Angeles in September. It is the second criminal trial in just months for the president’s son, who was convicted in June on three felony counts in a separate federal case over a 2018 gun purchase.
Prosecutors and the defense have been battling for weeks in court documents over what evidence and testimony jurors will be allowed to hear. Among the issues at stake is evidence related to Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which have been at the center of Republican investigations into the Democratic president’s family.
Prosecutors say they will introduce evidence detailing Hunter Biden’s business dealings with a Chinese energy conglomerate, as well as money he made serving on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Prosecutors say the evidence will show that Hunter Biden “performed almost no work in return for the millions of dollars he received from these entities.”
Special counsel David Weiss’s team also plans to tell jurors about Hunter Biden’s work for a Romanian businessman who prosecutors say tried to “influence U.S. government policy” when Joe Biden was vice president.
Prosecutors say they plan to call a business associate of Hunter Biden as a witness to testify about the arrangement with Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu, who they say sought help from U.S. government agencies to end a criminal investigation he was facing in his home country.
Hunter Biden and his business partner were concerned that their “lobbying work could have political ramifications” for Joe Biden, so the arrangement was structured to “disguise the true nature of the work” from Popoviciu, prosecutors allege. Prosecutors say Hunter and two business partners distributed more than $3 million from Popoviciu.
The defense has said evidence about his foreign business dealings is irrelevant to the tax charges and would only confuse jurors. They have accused prosecutors of improperly trying to introduce “extraneous, politically charged issues” into the trial.
Hunter Biden has pleaded not guilty, and his attorneys have indicated they will argue that he did not act “willfully” or with the intent to violate the law. They point to Hunter Biden’s well-documented struggles with addiction over the years and argue that his drug and alcohol abuse “impaired his decision-making and judgment such that Mr. Biden was unable to form the requisite intent to commit the crimes with which he is charged.”
Prosecutors have said that while Hunter Biden dodged taxes, he lived an “extravagant lifestyle,” spending money on things like drugs, escorts, exotic cars and luxury hotels. The defense is urging the judge to keep those salacious allegations out of the trial.
“The Special Counsel would want to introduce such evidence because it is objectionable and would arouse the interest of the jury, but for the same reasons and because such evidence would distract the jury from the crimes charged, such information would also be highly damaging to Mr. Biden,” the defense attorneys wrote in the court documents.
Hunter Biden was set to plead guilty to tax crimes last year in a deal with prosecutors that would have allowed him to avoid prosecution in the gun case if he stayed out of trouble. But the plea deal fell apart after a federal judge in Delaware raised concerns, and he was subsequently indicted in both cases.
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Richer reported from Washington.
