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Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, is set to appear in court on Wednesday in order to plead guilty to tax-related misdemeanors.
Hunter Biden is scheduled to attend the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building in Wilmington, Delaware, at 10 a.m. to plead guilty to two counts of not filing his taxes on time in 2017 and 2018, owing at least $100,000 in both years.
A deal was struck with prosecutors in June that a felony charge that Hunter Biden, who has a history of drug abuse, faced of being in possession of a firearm while being an unlawful user or addicted to a controlled substance would be dropped if he pleaded guilty to the tax offenses. Hunter Biden is not expected to be handed jail time after pleading guilty to the two misdemeanor charges.
The guilty plea is sure to be leapt upon by Republicans and critics of the president, with the reverberations potentially continuing all the way up to the 2024 election.
The GOP has long vowed to investigate alleged corruption between the Biden family, including claiming that as vice president, Joe Biden used his influence to intervene and benefit from his son's business dealings in Ukraine and China. The Republican lawmakers leading the probes have so far failed to uncover any real evidence backing up their claims, and the allegations have been denied by both the White House and Hunter Biden's lawyers.
On the eve of Hunter Biden's court appearance, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee filed court filings urging the judge overseeing the case in Wilmington, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, to reject the proposed guilty plea in order to consider consider testimony from IRS whistleblowers.
Rep. Jason Smith, the Republican chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, said that the whistleblowers alleged that Hunter Biden "benefited from political interference" from the Department of Justice under his father's administration during the investigation which "calls into question the propriety of the investigation of the U.S. Attorney's Office."
Noreika, who was appointed to the bench by Donald Trump, has the power to throw out Hunter Biden's guilty plea, although such an occurrence is rare.
Christopher J. Clark, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, condemned the Republicans for trying to intervene in the case at the 11th hour.
"Most troubling is that you have sought to append to a filing on the public docket hundreds of pages of documents, many of which contain grand jury secret information and confidential taxpayer information," Clark wrote in response to lawyers for the GOP panel, reported The New York Times.
Clark added that the accusations that the DOJ treated the president's son differently following political interference are "baseless and abusive." The DOJ has been contacted for comment.
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, and Florida ... Read more