President Joe Biden’s son to undergo trial in June after federal judge rejected his plea to quash tax.
In a significant development on Monday, a federal judge in California rejected Hunter Biden’s efforts to dismiss his tax charges, allowing the criminal case against the president’s son to proceed. The order has paved the way for a trial in June.
President Joe Biden’s son is confronting three felony charges and six misdemeanor charges related to tax evasion, filing a false return, and failure to pay taxes from 2016 to 2019. He has pleaded not guilty to all nine charges. His legal team contended last month that the case was politically motivated and compromised by two IRS agents who subsequently became whistleblowers.
Despite filing eight separate motions to dismiss the charges, each citing different legal arguments, all of Biden’s motions were turned down.
Judge Mark Scarsi dismissed Biden’s claim that the case was politically motivated, highlighting that Biden’s attorneys failed to provide evidence to support this assertion.
“The motion is remarkable in that it fails to include a single declaration, exhibit, or request for judicial notice,” Scarsi stated. “Instead, Defendant cites portions of various Internet news sources, social media posts, and legal blogs. These citations, however, are not evidence.”
Judge Scarsi further emphasized that the majority of the sources, which were mainly media reports about the case, “contain multiple levels of hearsay.”
Judge rejects Hunter Biden’s allegation of selective and vindictive prosecution
Additionally, the judge rejected Biden’s allegation of selective and vindictive prosecution.
“Defendant fails to present a reasonable inference, let alone clear evidence, of discriminatory effect and discriminatory purpose,” Scarsi wrote. “Accordingly, the selective prosecution claim fails.”
Biden’s legal team had also argued that the case should be dismissed due to “outrageous government conduct,” pointing out that two former IRS agents had later served as witnesses in a House GOP investigation into Biden.
Ruling vindicates Weiss, a Republican who was appointed by Trump to his former post as the US attorney in Delaware. Weiss’ prosecutors have defended the integrity and nonpartisan nature of their work — and said in court last week that it was “insulting” to suggest they were taking their cues from Trump or GOP lawmakers.
However, Scarsi did not entertain this argument, noting that there is no precedent for dismissing a case based on “outrageous government conduct.” He added that Biden’s claims did not meet the high standard required for dismissal.
This California tax case is one of two legal challenges Biden is facing as a result of special counsel David Weiss’s investigation. Additionally, the president’s son is contending with three gun-related charges in Delaware, to which he has pleaded not guilty. This plea followed the breakdown of a plea deal between him and prosecutors last year.
The husband of conjoined twin Abby Hensel, Joshua, is facing a paternity lawsuit from another woman. This comes just days after the report of Abby secretly getting married to the Army veteran in a 2021 ceremony surfaced. The lawsuit in concern was filed in 2023, nearly two years after Joshua Bowling, 34, said ‘I Do.’
On April 1st, 2024, the NY Post learned that Joshua Bowling is in serious trouble after his ex-wife, Annica Bowling, aged 33, filed a paternity case against him. According to court documents, Joshua and Annica have a daughter named Isabella. The couple, who got married in 2010, share joint custody of their eight-year-old daughter.
Previously, Isabella was the only daughter listed for the former couple. However, they separated in April 2019, and Annica had another daughter born in late 2020. It’s now possible the paternity of the second daughter is in question. The court documents don’t make it clear as the daughter is a minor.
For days now, the dicephalus conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel have been making headlines for their secret wedding in 2021. The twins first gained recognition on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1996 and later documented their lives on a TLC show.
The Post reports that Annica, Joshua’s ex-wife, has filed paperwork in Washington County in Minnesota in which she has requested DNA evidence from both Joshua and one more person, Gavin. According to the court records, Annica filed a request for a genetic test report just a few weeks ago, on March 7th, 2024. The details of the test and the results are not available to the public.
On March 27, Today obtained several official public court records confirming the legal marriage ceremony of the twins. Abby Hensel, who shares her Facebook page with sister Brittany, also took to her official handle to change the profile picture. The photo, from her wedding, shows the conjoined twins wearing a wedding dress. Bowling, on the other hand, is seen wearing a grey suit.
It was one of those viral social media claims so outlandish it demands independent verification: the Biden Administration had proclaimed that Easter Sunday (the day on which billions of Christians around the world remember the resurrection of Jesus Christ) would be Trans Visibility Day.
Once the claim proved true, it was hardly surprising that Christians across the nation took deep offense. Instead of lifting up the Son of God who died for our sins, Biden called on Americans to join him in “lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people.”
Nor was it surprising that the legacy media rushed in with “fact checks” to suggest the affrontery was completely unintended, sheer coincidence. The sum of the defense outlets like CNN, Reuters, and Politico offered was that the White House’s honouring of trans visibility has a long and storied history dating all the way back to… 2021.
The notion that this was not a deliberate finger in the eye of Christians to honour, on the holiest of Christian holidays, a group whose entire purpose is undermining God’s created order of male and female is preposterous. President Biden was under no obligation to issue a proclamation on trans visibility on March 31 simply because he done so a couple times before. No president before him, including Obama, had ever recognised such a day. And certainly he had dozens of other dates on the transgender awareness calendar, including a whole week in November, he could have chosen instead.
The substance of his proclamation was even more appalling, decrying the steps that states have taken to stop the permanent damage trans activists and profiteers are wreaking on children through surgeries, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones. Biden’s proclamation described the same reasonable bans that many other nations, including the UK, have now enacted when it comes to minors (and only minors) as “hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids.”
But his actions are perfectly of a piece with his continual antagonism of Christians. This is, after all, the administration whose Department of Justice targeted traditional Catholics as potential “domestic terrorists” and urged banks to track the purchase of Bibles as a potential indicator of “extremism.”
The Biden administration’s callous treatment of Christians has known almost no bounds. At the same time it is honouring the “transgender community,” it has told National Guard families that their children may not decorate their Easter eggs with “religious symbols” or “overtly religious themes for the annual White House Easter egg roll. One wonders who, exactly, the president thinks the activity was first intended to honour. Though such slights are child’s play compared to more serious manifestations of the administration’s hostility.
While the Biden DOJ has pursued maximum charges against peaceful Christian pro-life activists under the FACE Act, when a trans vandal violated the same statute by hatefully spray painting “F— Catholics” on a church’s walls and defacing its statute of Mary, the DOJ recommended no jail time.
And three days after a trans-identified shooter killed six Christians, including three children, to whom did it direct its sympathy? Not to followers of Christ, but to trans-identifying individuals like the one who had killed them, with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, saying, “Our hearts go out to the trans community as they are under attack right now.”
We live in a dark, dark world. A world that honours evil and mocks goodness and appeases the most unscientific ideology ever conceived with the desecrated bodies and destroyed reproductive capacities of even children. But the good news of the resurrection we celebrate today holds true – the light shines in the darkness, and, even now, the darkness has not overcome it.
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Biden is in campaign mode, and the president wants voters to know he understands housing is out of control.
Over the last month, Biden has ramped up his bully pulpit focus on the housing crisis. In his State of the Union address, the president pledged new tax credits for first-time homeowners and to “crack down on big landlords” who price-fix rents. His new budget includes proposals to expand vouchers and housing supply, and he gave a second speech promising to “build, build, build” to “bring housing costs down for good.” When the president hit the campaign trail in late March, he dedicated a Las Vegas stop to stumping his affordable housing initiatives, and on Friday his administration even announced it would embrace some new rent control.
You don’t have to squint to see how the housing crisis is complicating the otherwise positive economic message the president hopes to sell.
Mortgage rates are so high that most homeowners feel they can’t afford to move, and most renters feel priced out of the idea of homeownership altogether. Wages have gone up, but not faster than home-buying costs, and over 22 million households now spend more than a third of their income on rent as of 2022.
Inflation and the economy remain the top issues for voters, and economists cite high housing costs as a main culprit for inflation still exceeding the Federal Reserve’s target goal of 2 percent.
This is all creating bad vibes, at a time when the president wants to build enthusiasm for a second term. A Redfin-commissioned survey from February found almost two-thirds of homeowners and renters say housing affordability makes them feel negatively about the economy.
Politically, the president also has a lot to worry about when it comes to mobilizing the young people and voters of color who helped him eke out a victory in 2020. Polling indicates that it’s these voters — who are more likely to be renters — that Biden is now struggling with: those who cast ballots for him four years ago but are now leaning toward Donald Trump or considering staying home on Election Day.
The White House’s “opportunism is finally catching up to them and I say that in a good way,” said Tara Raghuveer, the director of KC Tenants, a tenant union in Kansas City, Missouri. “They know now that what they do needs to feel material to people.”
Housing doesn’t typically play a big role in presidential elections given that it’s a difficult issue for the White House to deliver short-term change on, and federal lawmakers more broadly have steered clear of issues like zoning, which largely fall under the purview of state and local governments.
The Biden administration has talked previously about housing, but it wasn’t an issue that stayed particularly high on the crowded legislative agenda. It fell out of the president’s $2 trillion Build Back Better package, and Biden rarely gave any speeches on the topic.
In 2022, his team did put out the Housing Supply Action Plan, a grab bag of proposals that the White House called “the most comprehensive all of government effort to close the housing supply shortfall in history.” But housing advocates critiqued the administration for failing to really lead bipartisan housing negotiations in Congress, for not fighting hard for housing money in competitive spending bills, and for not working closely enough with the private sector to bring down construction costs. (Daniel Hornung, deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council, told Vox they discuss housing often and it’s “part of almost every economic conversation we have with members of Congress.”)
In promoting his economic agenda in the summer of 2023, in what would become known as “Bidenomics,” the president emphasized three main planks: empowering workers, reviving domestic manufacturing, and reining in corporate power through competition.
Housing wasn’t much part of that conversation, but the White House is trying to change that now. In a newly released report, the president’s staff economists dedicated an entire chapter to increasing the supply of affordable housing and called for more aggressive federal action to lower costs, like pressuring cities to loosen zoning laws.
For now, the president’s $258 billion housing proposals seem geared toward the election, elevating more popular issues like junk fees and rent gouging. Biden also proposed new tax credits for first-time homebuyers and for middle-class families selling their starter homes, and a new $20 billion grant program to increase housing production. And rather than running on a universal expansion of housing vouchers to all eligible renters, as he did in 2020, the president is now proposing an expansion of housing vouchers to more politically popular groups — low-income veterans and youth aging out of the foster care system.
