Jury selection in Hunter Biden’s federal tax trial is set to begin Thursday, just months after the president’s son was convicted of gun charges in a separate case.
The case in federal court in Los Angeles accuses Hunter Biden of a four-year scheme to avoid paying at least $1.4 million in taxes while obtaining millions of dollars from foreign business entities. He already faces possible prison time after a Delaware jury found him guilty in June of lying on a 2018 federal form to purchase a gun he possessed for 11 days.
Hunter Biden has pleaded not guilty to charges related to his taxes from 2016 to 2019 and his lawyers have indicated they will argue he did not act “willfully” or with intent to break the law, in part because of his well-documented struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.
U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, who was appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump, placed some restrictions on what jurors will be able to hear about the traumatic events that Hunter Biden’s family, friends and attorneys say led to his drug addiction.
The judge barred attorneys from linking his substance abuse problems to the 2015 death of his brother Beau Biden from cancer or the car crash that killed his mother and sister when he was a toddler. He also rejected a defense expert proposed to testify about addiction.
The indictment alleges Hunter Biden lived lavishly while flouting tax law, spending his money on things like strippers and luxury hotels — “in short, everything but his taxes.”
Hunter Biden’s lawyers had asked Scarsi to also limit prosecutors from highlighting details of his spending that they say amount to “character assassination,” including payments made to strippers or pornographic websites. The judge has said in court papers that he will keep “tight control” over introducing potentially salacious evidence.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, could present more details of Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings, which have been at the center of Republican investigations into the Biden family, which often seek, without evidence, to link the president to an alleged influence-peddling scheme.
The special counsel’s team has said it wants to tell jurors about Hunter Biden’s work for a Romanian businessman, who they say tried to “influence U.S. government policy” while Joe Biden was vice president.
[Con información de The Associated Press]
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