Hunter Biden, son of U.S. President Joe Biden, departs federal court after a plea hearing on two misdemeanor charges of willfully failing to pay income taxes in Wilmington, Delaware, July 26, 2023.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Federal prosecutors plan to ask a grand jury to indict Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, before Sept. 29, they revealed in a court filing Wednesday.
The charges that special counsel David Weiss will seek against Hunter Biden were not disclosed in the filing in U.S. District Court in Delaware.
The new filing comes six weeks after a planned plea deal for Hunter to resolve charges of tax and weapons crimes fell apart when a judge questioned its conditions during a hearing in that court.
Hunter at that hearing ended up pleading not guilty to two counts of failure to pay federal income taxes on income of more than $1.5 million annually in 2017 and 2018.
Hunter Biden, who had business dealings in China and Ukraine, for years has been the focal point of allegations by Republicans of corruption involving him and his father. Neither Biden has ever been charged in connection with those allegations.
But Hunter Biden has been under criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware, which Weiss leads, since 2018. Weiss was appointed to that job by former President Donald Trump, who lost his re-election bid to Joe Biden in 2020, and who is now seeking a 2024 rematch as the Republican nominee.
Weiss in July enraged congressional Republicans in June by offering Hunter a plea deal on relatively minor charges, ones that would nearly guarantee he would not serve any time in jail.
As part of that deal, Hunter agreed to plead guilty to the misdemeanor charges of failure to pay income taxes. He also consented to a so-called pre-trial diversion agreement, which would allow him to escape being charged with a felony of possessing a firearm while being a drug addict if he abided by the conditions of that agreement.
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