Judge in Hunter Biden Tax Case Rebukes President Biden Over Pardon and ‘Rewrite’ of History in Scathing Response
President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden arrive at Fort McNair, Sunday, June 25, 2023, in Washington. The Biden’s are returning from Camp David. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
U.S. District Court Judge Mark Scarsi, who has overseen Hunter Biden’s tax evasion case in California, rebuked President Joe Biden over his explanation for his son’s pardon on Tuesday night in a scathing order.
The younger Biden had pled guilty in the tax case and was found guilty in a gun case earlier this year, but his get-out-of-jail free card came in the form of a sweeping pardon from his father, who absolved him of any criminal misconduct he might have committed over a more than decade-long period beginning in 2014.
“From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” wrote the commander-in-chief in a statement on Sunday. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong.”
Scarsi strenuously objected to this framing and accused the president of attempting to rewrite history.
After noting that the White House had improperly provided the court with a link to the president’s statement instead of the official pardon order, Scarsi proceeded to submit that “The Court previously noted its disapproval of this practice” and “the President’s statement illustrates the reasons for the Court’s disapproval, as representations contained therein stand in tension with the case record.”
He continued:
For example, the President asserts that Mr. Biden “was treated differently” from others “who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions,” implying that Mr. Biden was among those individuals who untimely paid taxes due to addiction. But he is not. In his pretrial filings, Mr. Biden represented that he “was severely addicted to alcohol and drugs” “through May 2019.” (Disputed Joint Statement of the Case 4, ECF No. 152.) Upon pleading guilty to the charges in this case, Mr. Biden admitted that he engaged in tax evasion after this period of addiction by wrongfully deducting as business expenses items he knew were personal expenses, including luxury clothing, escort services, and his daughter’s law school tuition. (E.g., Indictment ¶¶ 141, 149, ECF No. 1.) And Mr. Biden admitted that he “had sufficient funds available to him to pay some or all of his outstanding taxes when they were due,” but that he did not make payments toward his tax liabilities even “well after he had regained his sobriety,” instead electing to “spen[d] large sums to maintain his lifestyle” in 2020. (Id. ¶ 48.)
According to the President, “[n]o reasonable person who looks at the facts of [Mr.Biden’s] cases can reach any other conclusion than [Mr. Biden] was singled out only because he is [the President’s] son.” But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familialrelation to the President. (Order on Mots. to Dismiss 32–55); Mem. Opinion 6–19, United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-cr-00061-MN (D. Del. Apr. 12, 2024), ECF No. 99. And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.
“In short, a press release is not a pardon. The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history,” declared Scarsi.
