The judge who presided over the California tax fraud case against Hunter Biden called out the president for mischaracterizing and minimizing the charges against his son in announcing why he was pardoning him.
“The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history,” U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi wrote in a ruling late Tuesday.
An attorney for Hunter Biden had asked the judge to dismiss the indictment against his client in light of President Joe Biden’s pardon on Sunday night, but did not initially submit a formal copy of the pardon, and instead sent a link to the president’s statement saying that his son had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted” and was the victim of a “miscarriage of justice.”
Scarsi said the president’s “representations” in the statement accompanying the pardon “stand in tension with the case record.”
“For example, the President asserts that Mr. Biden ‘was treated differently’ from others ‘who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions,’ implying that Mr. Biden was among those individuals who untimely paid taxes due to addiction. But he is not,” the judge wrote.
He noted that Hunter Biden had said he “was severely addicted to alcohol and drugs” through “May 2019.”
“Upon pleading guilty to the charges in this case, Mr. Biden admitted that he engaged in tax evasion after this period of addiction by wrongfully deducting as business expenses items he knew were personal expenses, including luxury clothing, escort services, and his daughter’s law school tuition. And Mr. Biden admitted that he ‘had sufficient funds available to him to pay some or all of his outstanding taxes when they were due,’ but that he did not make payments toward his tax liabilities even ‘well after he had regained his sobriety,’ instead electing to ‘spen[d] large sums to maintain his lifestyle‘ in 2020,” the judge wrote.
Biden had pleaded guilty to all of the allegations against him in the California case on the eve of trial in September. Prosecutors said he had “engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019.” He then “filed false returns in February of 2020” claiming bogus business deductions “in order to evade assessment of taxes to reduce the substantial tax liabilities,” which he still didn’t pay, despite driving a Porsche and living in a $17,500-a-month rental house on a canal in Venice Beach, prosecutors said.
The taxes were eventually paid after federal investigators told Biden they were looking into his finances in December 2020.
Hunter Biden had been scheduled to be sentenced on the three felony and six misdemeanor tax charges later this month, before his father gave him a “full and unconditional pardon” for “those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”
The pardon also covers a gun-related case in Delaware. Biden was convicted by a jury on those charges earlier this year and had been scheduled to be sentenced in that case this month. The cases were brought individually after a plea agreement that would have disposed of both without jail time fell apart when a judge questioned some of the particulars of the deal.
Hunter Biden had argued in both cases that he was the victim of selective prosecution, but those claims were rejected by Scarsi and the judge in the Delaware case, Maryellen Noreika. Both are Trump nominees.
“According to the President, ‘[n]o reasonable person who looks at the facts of [Mr. Biden’s] cases can reach any other conclusion than [Mr. Biden] was singled out only because he is [the President’s] son.'” Scarsi wrote. “But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President. And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.”
David Weiss, the special counsel who brought the cases against Hunter Biden, made a similar point in a court filing earlier this week, noting three appeals court panels had rejected the selective prosecution claims as well.
There has “never has been any evidence of vindictive or selective prosecution in this case,” his office’s filing said. “In total, eleven (11) different Article III judges appointed by six (6) different presidents, including his father, considered and rejected the defendant’s claims, including his claims for selective and vindictive prosecution.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the judge’s remarks.
Despite his issues with the president’s statement, Scarsi vacated the sentencing hearing and indicated he would officially terminate the case after he gets an authenticating declaration confirming the pardon.
Noreika ordered the Delaware case terminated on Tuesday.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
