Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden and a recurring target of the Republican opposition, has admitted guilt in two criminal cases against him, hoping to settle the accounts as his father’s 2024 campaign takes shape.
This “ends” the prosecution of Hunter Biden, 53, his lawyer assured in a statement on Tuesday. “Hunter is committed to owning up to the mistakes he made when he struggled in his life with torments and addictions.”
“I am very proud of my son,” said the American president at the start of the afternoon.
The Republican opposition, for its part, denounced a Ministry of Justice which would go after Donald Trump – recently indicted for his management of top secret documents – while working to avoid at all costs a prison sentence for the son of the current president.
Hunter Biden pleads guilty, on the one hand, in a federal income tax fraud case, detailed prosecutor David Weiss, in charge of the case in the state of Delaware, cradle of the Biden family.
He will also, according to the same source, make an agreement with the prosecution in a case of violation of firearms legislation, which amounts to an admission of guilt.
He is accused of having acquired a firearm in 2018 while he was a drug addict.
Former President Donald Trump, who could face Joe Biden again in 2024, estimated in a reaction on his Truth Social network that Hunter Biden had only received a sentence comparable to a banal “fine for violating the code of the road” and claimed that the judicial system was “broken”.
The leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, denounced him a “preferential treatment”.
The president’s youngest son – the eldest, Beau, died in 2015 of brain cancer – candidly described his addiction problems, including crack, in a book published in the spring of 2021.
He reports the first drama of his life, the death of his mother and his little sister in a car accident in 1972.
Beau and Hunter were seriously injured in the accident, which occurred shortly after Joe Biden was elected senator from Delaware.
The Democrat later remarried Jill Biden, with whom he raised his two sons, and had a daughter.
In his book, Hunter Biden, a former lawyer and businessman turned artist, also claims to be now weaned from alcohol and drugs.
The American president, candidate for the 2024 election, has always publicly supported him and had already said he was “proud” of him during a heated debate opposing him to Donald Trump before the 2020 presidential election.
The judicial epilogue announced on Tuesday should do nothing to change the Republican opposition’s attacks on Hunter Biden’s business past.
Conservative parliamentarians accuse Hunter Biden of doing questionable business in Ukraine and China while Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president (2009-2017), capitalizing on his father’s networks and name.
They focus their attacks in particular on a highly paid position held by Hunter Biden on the board of directors of a Ukrainian gas group, Burisma.
The president’s son has always denied doing anything illegal or even immoral, but acknowledged in his book that if he could back out, he would not take the job.
Joe Biden has also rejected these accusations of corruption.
“My son has done nothing wrong,” he said in an interview with MSNBC last May. “I trust him,” added the American president.
20/06/2023 22:53:46 – Washington (AFP) – © 2023 AFP