Hunter Biden's Tax Case Sentencing Set for Before Joe Biden Leaves Office

Hunter Biden’s tax case sentencing is set for December 16, just weeks before President Joe Biden is scheduled to leave office.

Some Republicans speculated that Hunter changed his plea to guilty on Thursday to prevent any delay in his tax case sentencing.

“Want to know why he pled guilty to all 9 felony charges?” lawyer Rogan O’Handley posted on X. “Because if he went to trial and got convicted on even 1 charge, it would have delayed his sentencing date possibly into Trump’s term.”

“No pardon from Trump,” he said. “Now he is guaranteed to be sentenced before Joe is out and can get a clean pardon from daddy.”

Though many speculate about a potential presidential pardon, the White House repeatedly claimed Joe Biden would not pardon his son. The White House, however, has not publicly opposed the idea of Joe Biden commuting Hunter’s sentence. “As we all know, the sentencing hasn’t even been scheduled yet,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters in June in reference to Hunter’s gun conviction.

Hunter’s defense lawyer, Abbe Lowell, told Judge Mark C. Scarsi during Thursday’s proceedings that his client wished to alter his plea from “not guilty” to an “Alford plea,” thereby allowing Hunter to maintain innocence while accepting punishment as if he had been found guilty, Leslie McAdoo Gordon, the principal of McAdoo Gordon & Associates, P.C., recounted in The Federalist:

In the Hunter Biden case, during the argument before the judge that followed Lowell’s bombshell announcement of a prospective Alford plea, the lawyers debated with Judge Scarsi whether he was required to accept an Alford plea or had discretion to reject it. Lowell argued that the judge had to accept the Alford plea. The prosecution vigorously opposed any Alford plea. Assistant Special Counsel Leo Wise said the prosecution would “not under any circumstances agree to an Alford plea. We think it’s an injustice.” He urged Judge Scarsi to reject the offer of an Alford plea and proceed to trial.

…

After all the drama caused by Lowell’s surfacing of an Alford plea and the prosecution’s consternation, the ultimate resolution of the case was pretty standard. Upon taking up Lowell’s suggestion for a brief recess, the court released the parties. They returned to the courtroom a while later having worked out an agreement for Biden to plead guilty — not nolo contendere — to all the charges in the indictment, with the prosecutor reading the indictment (again) into the record as the factual basis for the guilty plea. The court accepted the guilty plea and released Biden to return for a sentencing date to be set at a later time.

The defense probably expected from the start that this is how the day would turn out. It could have proposed simply to plead to the indictment. Neither the prosecutor nor the judge could have really raised objections or concerns about that, as they did with the proposal of an Alford plea. Hunter Biden would be just as legally guilty, would be getting the same sentence, and likely the prosecutor would have just read the indictment into the record as he ended up doing because the parties did not have a prepared statement of facts. The only thing that would have been different is that Hunter Biden would not have actually and personally admitted guilt. The defense swung for that fence and fell short. But the end result isn’t really all that different. Hunter Biden didn’t want to go to trial; so, he didn’t.

More here on Hunter’s Alford plea.