Hunter Biden’s legal strategy takes shape as tax trial looms

Hunter Biden may no longer have a spotlight on him since his father, President Joe Biden, ended his reelection bid, but behind the scenes, the first son is preparing for what could be an ugly trial that shifts unwanted public attention back in his direction.

As the trial in California on Sept. 9 draws closer, Hunter Biden has rearranged his defense team and more broadly scaled back his once-aggressive approach to addressing years’ worth of unfavorable headlines and inquiries from Congress.

Hunter Biden’s lead defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, a prominent Washington, D.C.-based lawyer known for representing political figures such as former Democratic North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner, has downsized his role in the first son’s tax case.

Mark Geragos, a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles, took the reins from Lowell in early July and has since been helping the first son navigate the pre-trial process, court filings show.

A potential plea

While Lowell is still listed as a lawyer in the case, the shift from Lowell to Geragos came after plea negotiations this summer between Hunter Biden and special counsel David Weiss failed to produce any agreement, according to CNN.

Hunter Biden could reach a plea deal with Weiss at any time before the trial. However, after the highly public collapse of a deal between the pair in 2023, the first son may not find a second plea deal’s terms as appealing.

Geragos did not respond to a request for comment on the plea talks. Weiss’s office declined to comment.

Former U.S. Attorney John Fishwick indicated to the Washington Examiner that a plea deal would be in Hunter Biden’s best interest because the trial, if it moves forward, would be an unflattering ordeal for the first son. It would center on “huge payments to him for little or no work, and he did not pay taxes on these large payments,” Fishwick observed.

Hunter Biden is facing charges that include failure to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes, tax evasion, and filing false returns. He eventually paid his taxes back and has pleaded not guilty. Fishwick predicted the first son would take a plea bargain, no matter how unfavorable it is.

“Most folks on his jury will have paid taxes every time they receive a paycheck. Look for him to plead guilty,” Fishwick said.

The plea deal in 2023 would have allowed Hunter Biden to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and eventually wipe one felony related to a gun purchase from his record. But Judge Maryellen Noreika, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Delaware, unexpectedly rejected the agreement, citing unusual provisions in it.

A stalemate between Weiss and the first son over how to overcome Noreika’s concerns gave way to Weiss hitting the first son with three felonies related to the gun purchase, three tax felonies, and six tax misdemeanors.

Weiss secured a conviction for the gun charges after a weeklong trial in June that rehashed some of the darkest periods of Hunter Biden’s life from around 2015 to 2019, when he was addicted to crack cocaine and lost his brother to cancer.

The tax case is more elaborate and focuses on the same time frame, meaning it could last far longer and be equally as embarrassing for Hunter Biden and his family.

Like Hunter Biden, the Department of Justice would also benefit from avoiding a lengthy and complex trial featuring the son of the sitting president. However, Weiss offering anything less than a nine-count guilty plea to the first son at this stage would almost certainly prompt immediate and intense backlash from Hunter Biden’s critics, who argue he has already gotten off easy.

Despite his array of charges, some of which carry a maximum penalty of significant jail time, some have pointed to the fact that Hunter Biden has thus far avoided other charges. For example, prosecutors for Weiss recently confirmed in a court filing the well-documented fact that Hunter Biden lobbied on behalf of foreign entities while his father was vice president, potentially in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Prosecutors said they would not accuse Hunter Biden of a FARA violation at the trial but that they would introduce evidence that a Hunter Biden associate “structured a business relationship” with Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu “in an effort to avoid having to register as a foreign agent” because of the “political ramifications” for then-Vice President Joe Biden. The prosecutors noted Hunter Biden “did reach out to government officials, specifically the United States Department of State” as part of his business relationship with Popoviciu.

Tristan Leavitt, an attorney and president of the whistleblower advocacy group Empower Oversight, told the Washington Examiner that the lack of a FARA charge and charges for earlier tax years was a sign of the DOJ’s “preferential treatment” toward Hunter Biden.

“The latest example of this is the Justice Department highlighting to the court evidence that Hunter Biden violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act to avoid ‘political ramifications for his father’ — yet letting the statute of limitations expire on FARA charges just like they did on the earlier tax charges,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt has been helping Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler, a pair of IRS criminal investigators who reported their concerns about the DOJ’s handling of the case to Congress last year. He said Weiss’s plans to lay out evidence of other crimes Hunter Biden could have committed at trial without charging the first son for them is “yet another confirmation of what Shapley and Ziegler said all along.”

Leavitt’s comments underscore the pressure Weiss is facing to avoid granting any leniency to the first son. Republicans widely condemned the first plea agreement as a “sweetheart deal.”

Subtle retreats from the limelight

Hunter Biden, for his part, has been able to tackle his legal troubles largely out of the limelight over the past month, now that Joe Biden’s political relevancy is fading ahead of the presidential election.

But Hunter Biden was changing gears even before July 21, when his father dropped out of the race.

In addition to fruitless plea talks, the first son also went from relying on the high-dollar services of Lowell to instead using Geragos because of what CNN described as a “financial crunch.” Kevin Morris, an entertainment lawyer and confidante of Hunter Biden, had loaned the younger Biden millions of dollars to pay back his taxes and helped with his legal fees. But Morris, per the outlet, has stopped financing the first son’s legal pursuits.

In his two criminal cases, the first son also sought delays in the trials, referencing challenges with securing expert witnesses and a struggle to juggle two trials almost back-to-back, signaling his defense team was overwhelmed.

That could explain why, after Hunter Biden spent the last year going on offense and filing lawsuits against multiple entities who wielded his laptop data against him, he has taken a step back.

While he remains in a legal battle with the nonprofit group Marco Polo and its founder, Garrett Ziegler, who are behind the most prolific dissemination of the data, Hunter Biden inexplicably dropped a lawsuit he filed against Fox News. He also rescinded his lawsuit against former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, citing Guiliani’s bankruptcy troubles.

Despite the subtle retreats, Hunter Biden is still in for a massive fight if and when his tax trial moves forward.

In court filings, his defense team has been urging a judge to exclude from trial any evidence or mentions of Hunter Biden’s “extravagant lifestyle,” including references to strip clubs and pornography, which Weiss has argued the first son spent thousands of dollars on during the years in question. Weiss has told the judge the evidence is material to the case.

The court filings also show that, like his gun trial, women Hunter Biden was in intimate romantic relationships with, including his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, are expected to testify against him.

Judge Mark Scarsi, who is presiding over the case, has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday to sift through the numerous arguments about what can and cannot be used at trial.