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By Katherine Fung
Senior Writer
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A Donald Trump–appointed judge may have hurt the former president's defense in his federal criminal cases, inadvertently undercutting his arguments while causing a legal headache for Hunter Biden.
Hunter, President Joe Biden's son, was hit with nine new charges on Thursday. The federal indictment, filed in Los Angeles, alleges that Hunter failed to pay taxes, understated his income and exaggerated his expenses on tax returns. The Justice Department has been conducting a lengthy investigation into his taxes, and Hunter also faces firearm charges in Delaware for an allegedly illegal purchase of a gun by a drug user.
The younger Biden was largely expected to take a plea deal that would have spared him jail time over the summer. But that agreement ended in a dramatic collapse after U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika probed the terms of the deal and asked if the deal would grant Hunter blanket immunity in the future. When Hunter's attorneys said they believed the agreement would spare him from other charges, the prosecution disagreed.
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After Noreika, who was nominated by Trump in December 2017, rejected the deal, Hunter pleaded not guilty. By opening up Hunter to additional federal charges, Noreika to some extent allowed the Biden Justice Department to go after the president's son, an investigation that undermines Trump's selective-prosecution claims.
Newsweek reached out to Trump via email for comment.
Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade told Newsweek that although Noreika may have played a role in opening the door to Thursday's indictment, "the judge made the right call" when she revealed that the prosecution and defense had failed to find consensus about the possibility of charges against Hunter in the future.
The new charges against Hunter go against Trump's allegations that he's being unfairly discriminated against by the Justice Department because of his politics. His attorneys have already signaled that they plan to argue that the department's indictments against the former president—one related to his mishandling of classified documents and the other related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election—are politically motivated.
That argument, however, won't have merit if the same federal department, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, is also targeting the son of Trump's chief political rival.
"If White House political pressure on the Justice Department existed, it surely would have been brought to bear in a matter involving the president's immediate family," former federal prosecutor and elected state attorney Michael McAuliffe told Newsweek.
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By appointing U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee, to oversee the Hunter Biden probe and by declining to overrule the charges against Hunter, "Garland cannot be said to be engaging in political favoritism to please the president who appointed him," McQuade said.
"In fact, if anything, charging Hunter Biden seems like a very aggressive charging decision, considering the fact that he has repaid all back taxes and penalties," she said.
McAuliffe agreed that those decisions bolster Garland's efforts to maintain the independence of both the Hunter probe and the Justice Department itself. She stressed that Trump's claims about selective prosecution are not only untrue but also a moot point since the former president has expressed his willingness to target his political rivals during a second term.
Trump has threatened to seek "retribution" should he successfully win back the White House in 2024. He has told supporters that he would direct the Justice Department to investigate "every Marxist prosecutor in America" and warned that weaponization of the department could "happen in reverse."
"Trump complains that Biden's Justice Department is improperly targeting him with a political prosecution," McAuliffe said. "What doesn't get enough attention is that, in the next utterance, he explicitly promises to exact retribution against his political enemies with criminal prosecutions if he's elected president.
"He doesn't seem to believe it's an abuse of process and power to target political opponents if he's the one doing it," McAuliffe said.
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