Hunter Biden’s legal team is pushing back against the threat that a federal judge issued to them, saying they could be sanctioned for issuing “false statements” while they submitted a motion to dismiss the criminal charges their client is facing in California.
On Sunday, Biden’s legal team submitted a filing to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. In it, they wrote that they “never tried to mislead the court.
That statement came following a memo that U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi issued, in which he wrote the legal team for Biden falsely claimed that David Weiss, a U.S. Attorney, didn’t bring charges against Hunter until after Weiss was appointed as a special counsel.
As Biden’s legal team wrote in their filing:
“Defense counsel, perhaps inartfully, intended this use of the word ‘charges’ to refer to the current charges brought by indictment against Mr. Biden, not the lack of any charges at all. Here, context matters.”
The section of the motion that’s in question read:
“As U.S. Attorney, he had years to bring whatever charges he believed were merited, but he brought no charges until after he received the Special Counsel title that he sought.”
Last week, Scarsi issued an order, writing that the initial charges were brought by Weiss when he was serving as a U.S. Attorney, not after he was named special counsel. In that order, the judge also accused Biden’s attorneys of making false statements.
In response, his legal team said they’d amend their motion, replacing “changes” with “indictments” in it. They also emphasized, though, that when taken in the proper context, what they wrote isn’t misleading.
As they wrote in their new filing:
“Nevertheless, there is no basis on which to sanction Mr. Biden’s counsel for the use of that one word, which was not misleading in the context in which the two prior Informations had been repeatedly addressed with the Court.”
Biden’s legal team filed this response a few days after the judge issued them a legal order, saying they had to “show cause why sanctions should not be imposed for making false statements in the motion.”
The California trial against Biden is set to start this fall, though his lawyers have filed a motion to have the case dismissed entirely. He is being accused of not paying $1.4 million in federal taxes, at least, from 2016 through 2019.
In total, he’s facing nine charges — some misdemeanors and some felonies. They all allege that Biden attempted in 2018 to evade an assessment of his taxes by filing false tax returns. Instead, he used the money he owed the IRS to fund his indulgent lifestyle full of alcohol and drugs.
Biden has already been convicted in a Delaware court of federal gun charges — a case that he’s lawyers unsuccessfully tried to have thrown out, too.
In making their motions, Biden’s legal team cited a ruling from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who dismissed the federal classified documents case against former President Donald Trump because the special counsel in that case, Jack Smith, was appointed lawfully.