Claims that the incoming Trump administration would weaponize the legal system against Hunter Biden justifies a pardon for President Joe Biden’s criminally convicted son, his legal defense team said.
With just weeks until Hunter Biden is sentenced by California and Delaware judges, his lawyers on Saturday released a lengthy document titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden” that argued his gun and tax evasion convictions this year were politically motivated. The 52-page document pushed for clemency by alleging President-elect Donald Trump would turn the country’s justice system against Hunter Biden once he takes office on Jan. 20, 2024.
“A system that is supposed to protect against abuses failed to do so and was corrupted by political leaders in this country,” the document said. “As a result, Hunter faces significant sentences for felonies and misdemeanors far beyond precedents of others committing less serious offenses or where civil resolutions or consent judgments are normally sought — all on the basis of his mistakes, made while in the throes of serious drug addiction.”
Special counsel David Weiss has overseen the investigation into Hunter Biden for over a year. President Joe Biden’s head of the Department of Justice, Attorney General Merrick Garland, appointed Weiss to lead the investigation in August 2023. Weiss’s team is staffed with attorneys from the Biden administration’s DOJ.
The document claimed that “There is no disputing that Trump has said his enemies list includes Hunter. The prospect that Trump will turn his vengeance on the Special Counsel prosecutors if they fail to take a harder line against Hunter no doubt exerts considerable pressure on them not to let up on Hunter.”
Hunter Biden was found guilty by a Delaware jury in June of all three charges related to a 2018 gun purchase, including lying on a federal form about his drug use to purchase a revolver, submitting a false statement into a federal record, and unlawfully possessing the firearm for 11 days.
Months later, he pled guilty to all nine tax charges he was facing in a California court, meaning he could face up to 17 years in prison and up to $1.3 million in fines. Hunter Biden’s move in September came after he faced accusations he spent millions of dollars made from foreign business ventures on prostitutes, drugs, and other frivolous purchases while neglecting to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers on Saturday argued the case against him was bogus because he “fully paid his past-due taxes with interest and penalties in 2021 — over two years before any charges were brought.”
President Joe Biden has said he will not pardon his son for the convictions relating to the tax and gun charges before he leaves office.
However, Trump indicated last month he would be open to pardoning Hunter Biden.
The news came after Trump has repeatedly railed against the president’s son, particularly in the wake of the laptop scandal that broke in 2020. At the time, reports said Hunter Biden left a laptop at a computer store containing potentially damning information and indicating the Biden family had used the family name to peddle influence and grow their fortunes. Nude photos of Hunter Biden engaged in sexual acts on the hard drive also had critics steaming as Republicans took off with allegations of corruption.
Joe Biden and his allies called the laptop story a hoax and a Russian plant. Meanwhile, X released the “Twitter files” in 2022 confirming that the story had been suppressed as misinformation.
Following a years-long investigation, court filings from the DOJ released in January verified the computer’s authenticity.
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump said in June. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”
But by the time fall rolled around, Trump was sounding a new note of unity.
While he called Hunter Biden “a bad boy,” in October, arguing that “All you had to do is see the laptop from Hell,” he continued to leave the door open to pardoning Joe Biden’s son during his second term.
Trump has also suggested he could “easily” put former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in jail over her misuse of handling classified information during her time in the Obama administration.
Clinton was found to have sent “110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency [Department of State] to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received,” according to then-FBI Director James Comey, whose department led the investigation into Clinton.
“Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time,” Comey continued in a July 2016 press release before adding that there was “evidence” that Clinton and her colleagues were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
“I could have gotten Hillary Clinton very easily,” Trump reflected during a recent conversation with Republican radio show host Hugh Hewitt. “I could have had her put in jail.”
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However, the president-elect said he decided he “didn’t want to do that” because he believed it would be bad for the country.
“I thought it would look terrible,” Trump said.
