The federal judge presiding over Hunter Biden’s criminal case for tax evasion bashed President Joe Biden’s claim that the charges were politically motivated and even suggested the sweeping pardon he issued may have been defective.
In an order Tuesday evening, U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi ultimately agreed to end the tax-related criminal proceedings against Hunter Biden in Los Angeles, but only after delivering a series of sharp rebukes to the president.
“The president’s own attorney general and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges,” wrote Scarsi, an appointee of President Donald Trump. “In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants … are unreasonable people.”
Scarsi said the president’s written statement that Hunter Biden “was singled out only because he is my son” flew in the face of determinations by Scarsi and another federal judge — Trump appointee Maryellen Noreika, who handled a separate gun-related case in Delaware — that Hunter Biden was not a victim of selective or vindictive prosecution. Scarsi also took issue with factual claims in the president’s statement about his son’s drug use, saying that some of Hunter Biden’s crimes were committed after he admittedly regained his sobriety.
“A press release is not a pardon,” Scarsi added. “The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States … but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.”
But Scarsi also devoted more than a page of his five-page order to the notion that an aspect of the pardon may have crossed into unconstitutional terrain.
The president’s pardon encompassed the timeframe from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024 — the day he signed the pardon. That could be read, Scarsi noted, to include the few hours on Dec. 1 that had not yet elapsed when the pardon was issued. Such a “prospective” pardon could be seen as “exceeding the scope of the pardon power,” the judge wrote. Scarsi said that despite the potentially improper scope, he would treat the pardon as valid for the tax case he oversaw, which was explicitly listed in the broader grant of clemency.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On the day Hunter Biden’s trial on the tax charges was set to begin in September, he instead pleaded guilty to all the charges he faced: three felonies and six misdemeanors. His decision came about three months after a weeklong trial in Delaware that culminated with a federal jury taking just about three hours to convict him on the three felony charges he faced there related to his purchase of a handgun in 2018.
Scarsi’s order Tuesday formally canceled Hunter Biden’s sentencing set for Dec. 16 in the tax case. Earlier in the day, Noreika ended all proceedings in the gun-related case, scuttling the sentencing that had been set to take place next week in her Wilmington, Delaware, courtroom.
Both cases were prosecuted by David Weiss, whom Trump appointed as U.S. Attorney for Delaware and who was given special counsel status by Attorney General Merrick Garland in August 2023.
