The Department of Justice has reached an agreement with the wayward son of the president of the United States, Hunter Biden. He will plead guilty to three crimes in exchange for avoiding his imprisonment, according to a judicial document registered this Tuesday, an arrangement that will surely have an impact on his father’s re-election options and that has not gone down well with the Republican bench. Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, has spoken of double standards in the application of justice.
Biden has reached an agreement after years of investigation and months of conversations with the Delaware Prosecutor’s Office handling the case. Two of the crimes for which he will plead guilty are for tax fraud after failing to pay rent in the years 2017 and 2018, a situation that he later amended. The third is in connection with the purchase of a gun in 2018 during a period in which he was addicted to drugs. The Prosecutor’s Office will not charge him if Biden controls his addictions for 24 months and never buys a weapon again.
The agreement must be approved by a federal judge and the president’s son must appear in federal court in Delaware in the coming days to be arraigned and plead guilty to the tax fraud charges.
“With the announcement of two settlements between my client, Hunter Biden, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, I understand that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved,” Biden’s attorney Christopher Clark said. The president and the first lady, for their part, sent a brief statement on the matter through a White House spokesman, Ian Sams, assuring that “they love their son and support him as he continues to rebuild his life. We will have no more comments”.
Biden, 53, always a controversial figure and difficult for his father to handle, would thus avoid the fearsome imprisonment and would emerge unscathed from a long investigation. It opens, yes, a more than presumable political battle for the agreement. McCarthy has already pointed out that the story calls for an investigation by his party and that the Justice Department should not withhold information about the case based on the fact that it is an open investigation.