The White House is bracing for political fallout from a looming decision by federal prosecutors over whether to charge Joe Biden’s son Hunter with tax crimes and lying about his drug use when he bought a handgun.
In a signal that the investigation is nearing completion, Hunter’s lawyers last month held a meeting with David Weiss, the top federal prosecutor in Delaware, at the justice department in Washington, the Washington Post said. A separate report by CNN noted that Hunter’s longtime lawyer Chris Clark was among those entering the department headquarters.
Republicans would be sure to seize on a high-profile criminal case against Hunter, 53, in an effort to inflict political damage on the US president, who last week announced his bid for re-election in 2024.
Attacks on Hunter and his alleged laptop in the 2020 campaign fizzled but the 53-year-old is taking an increasingly public role at his father’s side, appearing at a state dinner honouring the French president, Emmanuel Macron; at the Kennedy Center Honors; and on a recent trip to the Republic of Ireland.
Hunter’s taxes and foreign business dealings have been under investigation by a federal grand jury in Delaware since at least 2018. His membership on the board of a Ukrainian energy company and his efforts to strike deals in China have raised questions by Republicans about whether he traded on his father’s public service.
As the FBI sought to interview him in 2020, Hunter was forced to publicly acknowledge that he was under scrutiny, stating: “I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors.”
Then media reports last October claimed that federal agents believed they had enough evidence to criminally charge Hunter on two matters: failing to report all his income to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and making a false statement in relation to buying a gun in 2018.
According to the Washington Post, Hunter filled out a federal form in which he allegedly answered “no” to the question of whether he was “an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance”. Yet the president’s son has acknowledged his long struggle with drug addiction and, in his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things, recalled spells in 2018 when he smoked crack “every 15 minutes”.
If prosecutors agree that evidence is likely to lead to a conviction at trial, it would represent a political gift to Republicans whose efforts to paint the Biden family as corrupt have failed to gain much traction beyond rightwing media.
Hunter’s new career as a painter previously raised ethical questions and now his legal and financial woes continue to pile up, posing political risks for his father’s re-election campaign.
Last week, Hunter was ordered to appear in a court in Arkansas in a paternity case involving Lunden Roberts, a woman with whom he had a child, now four years old. Citing a “substantial material change” in his income, Hunter’s lawyers have been seeking to lower child support payments from what they say are currently $20,000 a month.
Republicans, now in control of the House of Representatives, have opened their own investigations into nearly every facet of Hunter’s business dealings, including examining foreign payments and other aspects of his finances. Last month, an IRS special agent requested whistleblower protection to disclose information about alleged political interference and mishandling of the tax investigation.
On Friday, the Axios website reported growing disagreement between the White House and Hunter’s own team over how to handle the onslaught. Without consulting his father’s aides, the site said, Hunter hired the lawyer Abbe Lowell to take a more aggressive stance, while his team is planning to create a legal defence fund to help pay mounting bills that have reportedly put him millions of dollars in the red.
Richard Painter, a former chief ethics lawyer in George W Bush’s White House, declined to comment on whether he had been approached to act as an adviser to such a fund. “I’m an attorney and I get lots of calls from people who are interested in legal issues,” he said on Friday. “I end up engaging as a lawyer only for a small fraction of those but I’m not at liberty to discuss any of those types of calls publicly under the lawyer’s ethics rules for confidentiality.”
A legal defence fund could trigger further ethical problems for the White House. Anthony Coley, a former spokesman for the justice department, told Axios: “For this fund to work, it must be extraordinarily transparent and even restrictive by prohibiting foreign citizens and registered lobbyists from contributing. Without these type of guardrails, the fund will be a legitimate headache for the White House.”
Biden has said he has never spoken to his son about foreign business. There are no indications that the federal investigation involves the president. The attorney general, Merrick Garland, told a congressional hearing that he would not interfere with the department’s investigation and had left the matter in the hands of Weiss, the US attorney for Delaware, who would be empowered to expand his investigation outside the state if needed.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “If Biden’s son gets indicted, that obviously is going to lead to a long process that will most likely continue through the election and will give fodder to Republican claims about Hunter Biden being corrupt.
“On the other hand, I’m sure there will be people in the Biden camp, though not Biden himself, who will point to this as evidence of the rule of law, that the change from Trump to Biden is clear. That is, he did not interfere in the justice department’s investigation. It was straight up. It’s kind of good news for America, maybe bad news for Joe Biden’s family.”
Whether charges against Hunter would carry much sway with voters remains doubtful, especially if his father faces a rematch against Trump, who recently became the first former president to be indicted and has more legal headaches to come.
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, commented: “If there’s traction on the things that arguably could have affected policy during his dad’s vice-presidency, that could be troublesome. But if it’s simply troubled guy doing troubled guy things, it’s bad for Hunter and it will be touted a bit in the conservative press but I don’t think it’ll have a significant bearing on the president’s re-election.”
This article was amended on 8 May 2023 to clarify the timing of Hunter Biden’s Arkansas court appearance.
