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A federal district judge in Delaware left the bench temporarily on Wednesday while lawyers debated the final terms of Hunter Biden’s plea deal agreement.
Hunter Biden, through his attorneys, argued that the prearranged plea agreement should be accepted in its entirety. As part of the agreement, which was negotiated by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the president’s son agreed to enter guilty pleas to two misdemeanor tax offenses and to participate in a pretrial diversion program for one felony gun offense.
Hunter Biden mentioned his “20 years” of prior drug and alcohol abuse while being questioned by the judge earlier, adding that he had been sober since 2019. The judge then requested more information about the plea agreement before calling a break in the proceedings.
“Without the arrangement, President Joe Biden’s son could face up to 12 months in prison and a fine of $25,000 on each tax violation count, and a maximum sentence of 10 years in jail for the felony. The charges stem from the first son’s willful tax neglect in 2017 and 2018, when he failed to pay income taxes and owed more than $100,000 for each tax period. The felony charge stems from a 2018 incident when the president’s son lied on a gun application (ATF Form 4473) while attempting to make a purchase at a Delaware gun store,” the Washington Examiner reported.
“Under an agreement with Weiss’s office announced in late June, the first son entered into a pretrial diversion agreement for the gun charge, an alternative to prosecution that allows a defendant to avoid prison time. U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, an appointee of former President Donald Trump who had bipartisan support for her appointment, was widely expected by legal experts to approve the plea deal,” the outlet added.
The Examiner continued: “If Noreika signs off on the deal marks the end of a nearly five-year investigation into the younger Biden’s taxes and foreign business dealings that have been under the spotlight throughout the duration of his father’s presidency. It also marks the first time the Justice Department has brought charges against a sitting president’s child.”
Hunter Biden is also facing serious accusations from a whistleblower in another matter.
An IRS whistleblower testifying before a House committee last week gave some remarkable insight into previous evidence suggesting that President Joe Biden benefitted from his son Hunter Biden’s business deals, despite claiming he knew “nothing” about them.
During a media interview, Joseph Ziegler, an IRS special agent, noted that several roadblocks were put up when he was investigating Hunter Biden for alleged tax violations.
CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge asked Ziegler, “Did you uncover evidence that President Biden financially benefited from his son’s deals?”
“I don’t feel comfortable answering that question,” Ziegler said. “Any time we potentially wanted to go down the road of asking questions related to the president, it was, ‘That’s gonna take too much approvals, we can’t ask those questions.’ And I mean, it created an environment that was very hard to deal with.”
When he tried to press forward, he said the response he mostly got was: “Let’s put that on the back burner.”
“Wouldn’t a politically sensitive case require additional approvals?” asked Herridge.
“Yes, I do understand that aspect,” Ziegler said. “But it would be like, ‘Well let’s think about it and put that on the back burner.'”
EXCLUSIVE: Hunter Biden IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler tells @CBS_Herridge anytime IRS investigators potentially wanted to ask questions related to President Biden, they were told “That’s gonna take too much approvals. We can’t ask those questions.”pic.twitter.com/aitPxKpyUb
— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) July 19, 2023
At the end of the day, he said, the real issue is, “Are we treating everyone the same? Are we treating all taxpayers the same?”
“And in this case, no, I don’t think so,” he told Herridge.
At one point, he said he had wanted to interview Hunter Biden’s adult children because “a lot of the business deductions, expenses, [were] related to the adult children.”
Asked if he was ever able to obtain permission to talk to them, Ziegler said. “We never received the approvals to talk to those people” because he was informed by the assistant U.S. attorney that doing so would get them “into hot water.”
“Is that in the IRS handbook, avoiding hot water?” Herridge asked.
“No, but I mean, I was asking to do these certain things and roadblock after roadblock was put up in front of me,” he said.
CBS News noted further that Ziegler is “a 13-year veteran of the IRS” and “the second IRS employee to come forward to claim the federal tax investigation into the president’s son supported criminal charges more serious than the misdemeanor tax charges he is scheduled to plead guilty to next week as part of a plea bargain.”
