Federal lawyers have accused Hunter Biden of not paying his taxes. This is the second time he has been charged with a crime. Hunter Biden is the son of the US president.
He is accused of trying to avoid paying $1. 4 million in federal taxes from 2016 to 2019, according to the nine charges.
Three serious crimes and six lesser crimes are not filing or paying taxes, giving false information on a tax return and avoiding paying taxes that are owed.
Mr Biden, who is 53 years old, was accused of breaking gun laws in September in Delaware.
On Thursday night, his lawyer said the new charges are caused by politics.
President Joe Biden is not named in the charges, and the White House has not said anything about it yet.
Congressional Republicans are focusing on Hunter Biden’s business deals as they investigate President Biden for possible impeachment. President Biden is running for re-election next year.
If Hunter Biden is found guilty in the tax case, he could be sent to prison for as long as 17 years.
Since 2019, Special Counsel David Weiss from the US Department of Justice has been looking into a Yale-educated lawyer who used to be addicted to crack cocaine.
In a legal document in California, it is said that he used his money for things like drugs, expensive hotels and cars, and clothes instead of paying his taxes.
The president’s son got more than $7 million in total income between 2016 and 2020. But he didn’t pay his taxes on time for those years, even though he had the money to do so.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said that if Hunter’s last name was not Biden, he would not have been charged in Delaware and California.
Hunter Biden gave back all the money he owed in taxes and fines in 2020. He got a loan from his lawyer to help him do it.
The indictment includes a chart that shows how Hunter Biden used his money.
From 2016 to 2019, he spent more than $188,000 on “adult entertainment” and over $683,000 on “payments to different women”, as stated in the charges.
Prosecutors claim that Hunter Biden made a lot of money and spent it freely in 2018.
The charge says he earned a lot of money from a company he started with a big Chinese company, the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and someone from Romania.
The indictment says that as he made more money, he spent more on a luxurious lifestyle.
In 2018, the person being accused spent a lot of money, including taking out lots of cash, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to women, and spending $151,000 on clothes.
That year, Hunter Biden told his ex-wife he couldn’t pay alimony because he didn’t have enough money.
He stayed at expensive hotels, spent $10,000 to join a sex club, and said that $1,248 airline tickets for a dancer were a business cost, according to the charges.
The prosecutors say that he had enough money to pay some or all of his taxes on time, but he decided not to.
He supposedly took personal expenses and said they were for his business. For example, he rented a Lamborghini when he first got to California in 2018 until his Porsche arrived.
Earlier this year, Hunter Biden was supposed to admit to breaking tax rules in a deal with the people in charge of making sure the law is followed.
But the agreement didn’t work out because a judge thought it was strange. Congressional Republicans criticized it as a favorable deal.
This summer, two people who exposed wrongdoing at the IRS told Congress that they think Hunter Biden should have been accused of more serious tax crimes. They said they think he got off easy because he’s the president’s son.
Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler said the indictment on Thursday is a complete vindication for them.
In September, he was charged by the government for having a gun while using drugs and lying about it on a form. He said he did not do it.
The House of Representatives Oversight Committee is looking into whether President Biden did something wrong with his son.
Congressional Republicans say they found bank statements that prove Joe Biden lied about getting money from his son’s business. But the White House says the whole investigation is based on lies.