The son of US President Joe Biden, Hunter, will plead not guilty to illegal possession of a weapon, his lawyer said in a document made public on Tuesday September 19. Hunter Biden, 53, is accused of lying when filling out forms to acquire a firearm in 2018, in which he denied the addiction he later admitted to.
His lawyer, Abbe David Lowell, asks in a letter addressed to the judge, Christopher Burke, to allow his client, a resident of California, to make his first appearance not in Delaware where the court is located, but remotely. “Mr. Biden will plead not guilty and there is no reason why he cannot say these two words by videoconference,” assures his counsel.
His indictment in this case, on September 14, came two days after the opening of the impeachment investigation initiated by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives against the Democratic president.
A privileged target of the Republicans
Conservative parliamentarians accuse Hunter Biden of having made questionable deals in Ukraine and China by capitalizing on his father’s networks and name. They also claim that Joe Biden, when he was Barack Obama’s vice-president, exerted pressure on Kiev to facilitate his son’s affairs, notably obtaining the dismissal of the Ukrainian prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin.
The prosecutor’s ouster in 2016 actually followed coordinated efforts by the United States with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which accused him of covering up corruption and sabotaging government reforms.
Hunter Biden reached a guilty plea agreement with prosecutor David Weiss in June covering both tax evasion and illegal firearm acquisition charges, which likely would have allowed him to avoid prison and a embarrassing trial for him and his father. But this agreement was canceled following doubts expressed in July by a judge on the validity of the arrangement.
His father’s predecessor, Donald Trump, and many other Republicans, made Hunter Biden one of their favorite targets, seeing him as Joe Biden’s Achilles heel.
