Global Courant
WASHINGTON — The charges against Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, are rarely prosecuted, legal experts say.
Under a plea deal reached with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware — an office headed by Donald Trump appointee David Weiss — Hunter Biden will plead guilty to two counts of non-payment of taxes, which he later repaid. Biden also faces a gun possession charge — possession of a firearm by a person who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance” — but will likely be dismissed if he meets certain conditions of the plea deal, according to the court documents.
The federal gun charge, which makes it illegal for a drug addict to own a gun, is a rarely used statute that faces legal challenges and has recently been used as a blanket indictment against white supremacists.
Like the gun charges, the tax charges are rarely filed against first-time offenders and rarely lead to jail time, Andrew Weissmann, a former FBI attorney and NBC News contributor, said. tweeted Tuesday. “This is when something hard, not mild,” he wrote.
Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti agreed. “It is an insult to the intelligence of the American people to equate tax levies with a plan to steal top secret documents and obstruct justice when the government demands them back,” he said. tweeted, comparing the charges against Hunter Biden to the recent federal indictment against former President Donald Trump. “At least Hunter Biden was treated harshly – those crimes rarely get charged.”
The gun charge itself is under legal threat. A federal appeals court ruled in June that the government cannot bar those convicted of nonviolent crimes from owning a gun, and a Texas federal court recently ruled — following a landmark Supreme Court case last year that expanded gun rights — that prohibiting drug users from owning guns violates the Second Amendment.
The charge has often been used in high-profile cases where the underlying conduct does not clearly violate federal criminal law. Last week, the mother of a 6-year-old boy shot his teacher in Newport News, Virginia, pleaded guilty to the charge – possession of a firearm while using marijuana – along with a charge of making a false statement.
The charges have led to serious prison sentences in other cases. A 23-year-old from Waterloo, Iowa, was recently convicted to nearly five years in prison for possession as a drug user, while another 23-year-old in Lincoln, Nebraska, received three years in federal prison on the charges. Other punishments weren’t so harsh: A man arrested on a burglary call in Vermont in May 2022 received served a prison sentence in March 2023. (There are undoubtedly other recent cases; but those that resulted in insubstantial sentences are also less likely to be cited in press releases from US attorneys.)
The charge has also recently been used against white supremacists when their conduct did not constitute a clear violation of any other criminal statute, including against a white supremacist who was arrested in DC and found with a stash of weapons after him brother died by suicide. In that case, a federal public defender who had been on the job for 30 years said he “never had a case where the government went ahead” with the drug addict charge. A judge agreed that the charge was unusual. The white supremacist was eventually sentenced to prison after less than a year behind bars.
Chuck Rosenberg, a former top federal prosecutor and acting administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and a current NBC News legal analyst, noted that the charge of possession of an addict is used “sparingly,” but said that doesn’t mean it’s inappropriate. was used in the case of Hunter Biden, as each case had to be judged on the individual evidence.
Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor and an NBC News legal analyst, said on MSNBC Tuesday that the deal that Hunter Biden reached was a decent result for the president’s son, but not the “sweetheart deal” that Trump and his allies have Closed. are.
While the plea deal stipulates that prosecutors will recommend probation, the federal judge who ultimately convicts Hunter Biden is not bound by that agreement and could ultimately rule that the charges warrant incarceration. Hearing dates have not yet been set in the case.
