Less than 24 hours after President Joe Biden he forgave his son Hunter Biden and criticized his indictment as a “miscarriage of justice,” special counsel David Weiss’ prosecutors defended the integrity of their work in a pair of court filings and strongly denied they were motivated by the president’s whistleblowing policy.
“In all, eleven different (federal) judges appointed by six different presidents, including his father, considered and rejected the defendant’s claims, including his claims of selective prosecution and retaliation,” wrote U.S. Attorney Leo Wise in a ten-page filing for Hunter Biden. tax case on Monday.
President Biden pardoned his son on Sunday at the beginning of the year He was convicted of federal weapons charges and pleaded guilty to separate tax-related charges, and was scheduled to be sentenced in both cases later this month.
In Monday’s filing, prosecutors asked the federal judge overseeing the Hunter Biden tax case in California not to dismiss his indictment, but instead to close the case, which would allow the records to continue to exist.
“The government does not dispute that the defendant was the recipient of an act of mercy. But that does not mean, and does not mean, that the grand jury’s decision to indict him, based on a finding of probable cause, should be overturned as if it never happened,” Wise wrote. . “It also does not mean that his charges should be dismissed because the defendant falsely claimed that the charges were the result of some improper motive.”
Mark Osler, St. Thomas University, an expert on presidential pardons, said Weiss’s overture “raises a technical issue — whatever, the case goes away — but an important one.”
“(Prosecutors) want the indictment to remain on the record,” he told ABC News.
Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, arrives behind closed doors before the House Judiciary and Senate committees on Capitol Hill N in Washington, Feb. 28, 2024.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Without directly addressing President Biden’s criticism of the case as being selective and unfair, the filing said Hunter Biden’s lawyers had made “all the arguments” to dismiss the case and provided no evidence that the prosecution was vindictive.
“The court also found its plaintiffs’ claims unsupported by any evidence or even a coherent theory of the claim,” the filing said. “And there was and has been no evidence of retaliatory or selective prosecution in this case. The defendant made similar baseless allegations in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware. Those claims were also dismissed.”
Prosecutors opposed the dismissal of Hunter Biden’s indictment on the Delaware gun charge, arguing in a similar filing that “because there was no error in the grand jury indictment, there is no reason to dismiss it here.”
“Defense lawyers falsify the law. Nothing is required to dismiss the accusation in this case,” said that file.
