A federal judge in Delaware has formally dismissed the misdemeanor tax charges against him Hunter Biden on Thursday, but the president’s son is expected to face the same – or new – charges in the near future.
US District Judge Marilyn Norica’s decision was expected in the wake of a failed plea agreement last month between federal prosecutors and President Joe Biden’s son.
Special counsel David Weiss’s office moved to dismiss the charges last week, citing venue problems that would not have been an issue had Biden pleaded guilty, as initially expected.
Biden was This year he agreed to plead guilty On misdemeanor charges related to his failure to pay income taxes against the Public Prosecution’s recommendation for a probation sentence. But the The agreement collapsed About the confusion at the hearing on a separate gun charge and the judge’s questions about the deals.
As the US Attorney General for Delaware. Weiss was the lead prosecutor at the time. Since then he has been appointed as a privy councilor.
After the session, the two parties continued negotiating, but reached an impasse. Prosecutors said last week that the trial was in order.
They indicated that they would likely press charges against Biden in California or Washington, D.C. or other,” the filing said.
“If the special counsel does anything other than rehash the same misdemeanor tax charge in a jurisdiction where it has a place,” Biden’s attorney, Abe Lowell, said Friday in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” people should ask themselves the following question: Five years and all things investigated, if anything changes in what happens after that, people have to ask that it must be something other than the facts or the law that afflicted the process at this point.”
The judge did not decide a case related to a separate gun charge, a felony alleging that Biden illegally possessed a .38 Colt Cobra Special revolver during a time when he was abusing drugs. Under the terms of the failed plea deal, the charge would have been dropped within two years had Biden honored the terms of the diversion agreement with prosecutors.
Biden’s lawyers said last week that they consider that deal — which included a clause shielding him from some other potential charges — to remain valid because both sides signed on to it.
Prosecutors say the deal was not valid, because the agreement also needed to be signed by the monitoring office and it was not.
One of Biden’s attorneys, Chris Clark, moved to withdraw from the case during a back and forth, saying he expected to be called as a witness in the dispute. Norica signed his withdrawal in a separate order late Thursday.
This article was originally published NBCNews.com
