If altered charges come back, lawyer says the question is: ‘What infected the process?
After five years, the US attorney pursuing Hunter Biden has only been able to file tax and unlawful gun possession charges – and that shouldn’t change just because the prosecutor has been named special counsel in the case, the lawyer for the president’s son has said.
“If anything changes from his conclusion … the question [that] should be asked [is] what infected the process that was not the facts and the law?” Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. Lowell also said: “There’s no new evidence to be found.
“Only thing that will change is the scrutiny on some of the charges.”
Lowell’s remarks came after the US attorney in Delaware who has been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, David Weiss, received an appointment on Thursday to become special counsel over the case.
The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has said Weiss told him days earlier that “in his judgment, his investigation [had] reached a stage at which he should continue his work as a special counsel, and he asked to be appointed”. Garland added that he granted the request of Weiss – who was appointed to his post by Joe Biden’s presidential successor Donald Trump – having concluded that it was “in the public interest” to do so.
Yet Garland’s justification did little to dampen a political firestorm in Washington DC. Weiss’s probe into Biden’s son is set to continue on a track that is parallel to special counsel investigations into Trump – the Republican frontrunner to challenge Biden in the 2024 race for the White House – which have produced a multitude of criminal charges against him.
The Democratic incumbent, too, is under a special counsel investigation over his retention of government secrets after he finished his vice-presidency to Barack Obama in 2017.
But in speaking to Face the Nation host, Margaret Brennan, on Sunday, Lowell sought to pour cold water on the notion that Weiss’s appointment represented a significant upping of the ante against his client.
“He’s the same person he’s been for the last five years,” Lowell said of Weiss.
Hunter Biden – who has been a lobbyist, lawyer, banker, consultant and artist – has been charged with two misdemeanors for failing to pay taxes on more than $1.5m in income in 2017 and 2018. The 53-year-old has since paid up, but he is also charged with illicitly owning a firearm while addicted to and using a controlled substance amid a broader struggle with addiction.
One of Delaware’s federal judges in July was reviewing a proposed plea deal offered to Hunter Biden for him to avoid the gun charge, which is a felony. But during that review, he pleaded not guilty to the tax charges, causing the unexpected collapse of the plea deal.
Lowell said on Sunday that his side and prosecutors remained at an “impasse” over negotiations to revive the plea deal, meaning Hunter Biden could go to trial. But a trial is “not inevitable”, he said. “We were trying to avoid one all along, and so were the prosecutors.”
The lawyer for Hunter Biden also made it a point to say that Weiss has “already looked at” whether his client’s seat on the governing board of a Ukrainian energy company violated a federal law requiring agents of foreign states to register as such. That board seat has been a source of constant criticism from the American political right wing.
“Our client has been investigated in … a long, thorough, painstaking investigation for every transaction that he was involved in,” Lowell said. “I can assure you that the only charges that made sense were two misdemeanors for failing to file, like millions of Americans do, and a … gun charge.”
Special counsels such as Weiss are appointed in cases in which the attorney general believes the US justice department faces a conflict of interest. They report to the attorney general but are independent.
In his own interview on Sunday on CNN, New York Democratic congressman Daniel Goldman said the reactions to the various special counsel investigations revealed a key difference between his party and the Republicans, many of whom assert that Trump is being unjustly persecuted because of his lead in the race for the GOP’s 2024 White House nomination.
Those assertions persist despite detailed charges that he schemed to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, took measures to conceal hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, and illicitly hoarded government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after his presidency. Trump has pleaded not guilty and denies all wrongdoing.
Goldman, for his part, said: “If Hunter Biden has committed crimes, he should be charged with them. I’m a Democrat saying that. You don’t hear [Republicans] saying that if Donald Trump committed crimes, he should be charged with them. And that’s a critical distinction that the public needs to understand.”
Hunter Biden is the president’s only surviving son after the former Delaware attorney general Beau Biden died at the age of 46 in 2015. His father and Trump are both historically unpopular with voters, according to recent polls.
source: Guardian
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