Hunter Biden joined his family onstage this week in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, where President Biden gave a valedictory address and the crowd roared, “Thank you, Joe.”
A more grave proceeding came Wednesday in Los Angeles as a federal judge held a final hearing before Hunter Biden’s criminal trial on tax evasion and fraud charges, slated to begin Sept. 5.
The president’s son, a resident of Malibu, was not present in court. The 54-year-old remained with the rest of the Biden clan, including his father, on a family vacation more than 100 miles north at the Santa Ynez Valley estate of businessman and Democratic Party donor Joe Kiani.
In his absence, prosecutors and his defense team, led by veteran attorney Mark Geragos, argued acrimoniously about what jurors will — and will not — hear about the younger Biden’s tumultuous, drug-fueled life from 2016 until he became sober in 2019.
At one point, Geragos accused federal prosecutors of “character assassination” because of their efforts to limit what the defense could tell jurors about Hunter Biden’s addiction and the roots of it.
“They want to slime him,” Geragos said. “Because that is the whole purpose — making him look bad” and putting on a “salacious, typical independent counsel-style prosecution.”
The president’s son faced another trial in June, when a jury in Delaware found him guilty of illegally buying a gun. Both prosecutions were set to fuel a barrage of attacks on the Bidens by former President Trump and his allies in the run-up to the November election. But Joe Biden’s decision last month to drop out of the race altered that calculus.
The crux of the case now being brought by prosecutors is that the president’s son failed to file and timely pay his taxes, and that when he did file in 2020, he committed felony tax evasion, among other violations, by misclassifying personal expenses, including college tuition for his children and $30,000 to a pornographic website, as business expenses.
The “centerpiece” of the defense’s case is how trauma has altered Hunter Biden’s life, triggered his addictions and led to a particularly out-of-control period when he lived in luxury hotels in L.A. and abused crack cocaine around the clock.
And so Geragos took umbrage at efforts by prosecutors to prevent or limit his team from speaking about the 1972 death of Hunter Biden’s mother and sister in a car crash or the 2015 death of his brother due to brain cancer.
“They are creating a portrait for the jury of someone who was plopped down in West Hollywood and decided to just party and do cocaine as if he didn’t have a care in the world,” Geragos said. The “lopsided” result, he said, would erase key context and was “actually a form of character assassination by the prosecution.”
U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, appointed to the bench by then-President Trump, appeared unswayed.
“I don’t know if there’s any good evidence as to what causes addiction,” the judge said, asking, “Why is the cause of Mr. Biden’s addiction relevant?”
Prosecutors agreed, arguing that early life trauma, however awful, was outside the scope of the case.
“No matter how many drugs you take, you don’t suddenly forget that when you make 11 million dollars, you have to pay taxes,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Leo Wise said.
During the more than three-hour hearing, Scarsi mostly sided with the prosecution, prohibiting Hunter Biden’s lawyers from calling an addiction specialist to testify and from telling jurors that the president’s son eventually paid off his tax debts and penalties, with help from a loan from L.A. lawyer Kevin Morris.
If any lawyer violates the judge’s rules about what evidence is barred from trial, Scarsi promised to impose “six-figure sanctions” and said he has no qualms about overturning a verdict or declaring a mistrial.
The hearing affirmed how much the trial will be a sequel of sorts to the June court proceedings in Delaware where the younger Biden was found guilty of three felonies for lying about his drug use when he purchased and briefly owned a handgun.
The tax case looks at a similar time period through a different prism: where Hunter Biden’s income came from, how he spent it and, ultimately, how he reported it all to the Internal Revenue Service.
Prosecutors said they plan to call fewer than 30 witnesses, including Hunter Biden’s girlfriend from 2018 who was dispatched to clean up hotel rooms littered with his crack cocaine paraphernalia. An employee from Streamray — the porn site where the younger Biden spent $30,000 — will also testify, prosecutors said.
Noting that Morris also paid for Hunter Biden’s lavish lifestyle, including a rental home, Porsche, security detail and crisis team, Wise said there was no plan to call the Hollywood attorney to the witness stand.
But the tussling over whether and how the defense could bring up the tragedies that defined the younger Biden’s life continued until the end, with Geragos saying it was “fair game” to bring up Hunter Biden’s mother’s and siblings’ deaths if the defendant took the witness stand.
“The accident, I think, is still out of bounds,” Wise said, referring to the 1972 car crash. “How the defendant could say that caused it 40 years later is wildly beyond” the scope of the case.
Geragos ripped into the prosecutor: “More power to Mr. Wise that he’s never had anyone close to him with substance abuse problems.”
Wise, his face visibly reddening, stood up and asked, Can we not talk about me?
Scarsi ultimately ruled that the “causal connection” between Hunter Biden’s past traumatic events and addiction could not come into the case, and nor could the deaths of his mother and sister. The death of his brother, Beau, in 2015 could be mentioned but not as a causal aspect of his addiction, the judge said.
“The ruling of the court is that it’s too far afield,” Scarsi said, adding that “jury sympathy” would be the “only” reason for introducing it.
Times staff writer Laura Nelson contributed to this report.
