Global Courant
Federal authorities with the U.S. law firm in Delaware, led by U.S. attorney David Weiss, a Trump-era appointee, opened their investigation into Hunter Biden in 2018. The investigation became public in December 2020, shortly after Joe Biden assumed the presidency had secured , when Hunter Biden confirmed the investigation into his “tax affairs.”
Prosecutors have since investigated a range of possible crimes as part of their investigation and brought several witnesses before a federal grand jury in Wilmington, Delaware.
The impetus for the investigation and the researchers’ primary focus was whether Hunter Biden paid enough taxes on millions of dollars of his income. The younger Biden paid off at least one significant tax debt of nearly $2 million in 2021 with the help of a Los Angeles-based entertainment lawyer named Kevin Morris, ABC News reports.
Aside from his taxes, investigators examined a gun application form signed by Hunter Biden in 2018. On the form, he checked a box to indicate he was not an “unlawful user” of drugs, though he later acknowledged that he was indeed addicted to crack cocaine around that time, ABC News has reported.
Hunter Biden, a Yale-trained attorney, repeatedly said he was cooperating with investigators and remained “100 percent sure” he would be cleared of any wrongdoing. Joe Biden has said he never spoke to his son about his foreign affairs and recently said Hunter Biden “did nothing wrong”. There is no indication that the president was involved in the federal investigation in any way.
The White House has repeatedly tried to distance the president from the investigation, and Attorney General Merrick Garland assured Congress that there would be no “interference of any political or improper nature.”
