Worthy Christian News > US News > Hunter Biden Facing Potential Prison After Tax Indictment

Hunter Biden Facing Potential Prison After Tax Indictment

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Worthy News) – The son of U.S. President Joe Biden faces a potential 17-year prison term after being indicted Thursday for evading at least $1.4 million in federal taxes while maintaining a luxurious lifestyle.

Hunter Biden spent his money on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes” from 2016 to 2019, prosecutors said.

The indictment says that the president’s son “individually received more than $7 million in total gross income” between 2016 and mid-October 2020 but “willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 taxes on time, despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes”.

He faces nine tax-related charges, including three felony counts, according to documents filed Thursday in a federal court in Los Angeles.

Hunter Biden was already indicted in September on separate federal firearm charges in Delaware. The 53-year-old has already pleaded not guilty in the gun case.

Hunter Biden eventually paid all his taxes and fines back in 2020 – with the help of a loan from his attorney.

A chart inside the indictment outlines what Hunter Biden spent his money on, including $188,000 on “adult entertainment” and over $683,000 on “payments – various women.”

SPENDING WILDLY

Hunter Biden “continued to earn handsomely and to spend wildly in 2018″, prosecutors allege.

The indictment notes he made “substantial” income, including from a company he formed with a Chinese business conglomerate, the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and an unnamed Romanian businessperson.

As his income increased, so did his expenditures on an “extravagant lifestyle,” claimed the indictment.

He allegedly often wrote off personal expenses as business expenses, like a rental of a Lamborghini that he drove when he first moved to California in April 2018 until his Porsche arrived from the East Coast.

This summer, two Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblowers testified to Congress that Hunter Biden should have been charged with more severe tax crimes. Still, they alleged he received lenient treatment as the president’s son.

Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler said Thursday’s indictment serves as “complete vindication.”

“Eight months ago, we did something ordinary people don’t do: we risked our careers and reputations to bring the truth out of the shadows and into the light,” they said in a joint statement. “This is much bigger than our investigation or any one individual: it’s about equal treatment of taxpayers under the law.”

HOUSE INVESTIGATION

The U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee currently leads an impeachment inquiry of President Biden, claiming he was involved in an influence-peddling scheme with his son.

Earlier this year, Hunter Biden had been expected to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges in a deal with prosecutors.

But that agreement fell apart after a judge questioned it as “unusual.” Congressional Republicans later slammed it as “sweetheart deal”

Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement that if the president’s son’s “last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought.”

“I wrote U.S. Attorney Weiss days ago seeking a customary meeting to discuss this investigation. The response was media leaks today that these charges were being filed,” said Lowell, confirming that Hunter Biden “paid his taxes in full” more than two years ago.

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1970 to Joe Biden and his first wife Neilia, Hunter was given his mother’s maiden name as his first name. His later drug addiction and personal problems have been linked to a troubled past.

He was only two years old in December 1972 when – less than six weeks after his father’s election to the US Senate – a truck rammed into the family car.

TAKING LIVES

The accident took the lives of his mother and his baby sister Naomi while leaving him with a fractured skull and his older brother Beau with a broken leg.

The elder Biden – not in the car – took his oath of office by their bedside in a hospital. Hunter later attended Georgetown University and Yale Law School, graduating in 1996.

Between the two degrees, he joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a Catholic group that serves marginalized communities.

There, he met his first wife, Kathleen Buhle, a lawyer, and they married in 1993. They have three children – Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy – but they split in 2017.

Hunter started drinking as a teenager and has acknowledged abusing cocaine as a college student. He signed up for the US Navy Reserves and was sworn in before his father – then the vice president – in a White House ceremony.

But on his very first day at the naval base, he tested positive for cocaine use and was discharged, something he later said he was “embarrassed” by.

The respected New Yorker magazine said he drank excessively after the death of his older brother, Beau, from brain cancer in 2015, sometimes only leaving the house to buy vodka. “He and Beau were one,” his daughter, Naomi, once wrote on Twitter. “One heart, one soul, one mind.”

LEGITIMATE BILLS

During their acrimonious divorce, Buhle accused Hunter of “spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations) while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.”

Breaking her silence last year on how the 24-year marriage unraveled, she once said: “He was struggling under a massive drug addiction, and that’s heartbreaking and painful, and that wasn’t who I was married to.”

In his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things, Hunter concedes that his infidelity was the final straw in their marriage. A DNA test in 2019 found he was “the biological and legal father” of a child born to Lunden Alexis Roberts, an exotic dancer from Arkansas.

He has settled a paternity suit with Roberts and pays her child support. Media said none of the Bidens appear to have ever met Navy Roberts, now four years old, but President Biden recently acknowledged his seventh grandchild after public pressure.

Even before his split from Buhle was finalized, Hunter entered into a relationship with his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden. For about two years, they bonded over the shared and “very specific grief” of their loss, he told the New Yorker magazine.

Two months after completing rehabilitation in 2018, Hunter purchased a handgun, telling a family friend: “I know you all think the wrong brother died.”

He lied on the firearm application form that he was not using drugs at the time – an offense for which he now faces criminal charges.

FINDING WEAPON

Hallie Biden found the weapon in his vehicle and, for fear he might hurt himself with it, said she tossed it in a bin behind a grocery store.

Reports of an “amicable” split between the two surfaced in 2019, less than a week after his father launched a third presidential bid. But weeks later, Hunter wed South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen after a reported whirlwind six-day romance. They have one son.

Speaking out in 2019 on his struggle with addiction, he said: “You don’t get rid of it. You figure out how to deal with it.”

In Beautiful Things, he credits his survival to his family’s love, recounting an intervention that ended with his father tightly embracing him and saying: “I don’t know what else to do. I’m so scared. Tell me what to do.”

The Yale-educated lawyer and recovering crack cocaine addict has turned in recent years to painting as a form of therapy. He said it “keeps me away from people and places where I shouldn’t be.”

But sales of his artwork – up to $500,000 a piece – have created an ethics dilemma for the Biden White House, commentators say. President Biden has defended his son on multiple occasions, most notably during a presidential debate in 2020.

After then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump took issue with his child’s struggles, Joe Biden responded: “My son – like a lot of people – had a drug problem. He’s fixed it and worked on it, and I’m proud of my son.”