US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter will plead not guilty to unlawful possession of a weapon, his lawyer said in a document released Tuesday.
• Read also: Joe Biden’s son federally charged with illegal firearm possession
Hunter Biden, 53, is accused of lying when filling out forms to purchase a firearm in 2018, in which he denied the addiction he later admitted.
His lawyer, Abbot David Lowell, asks in a letter addressed to Judge Christopher Burke to allow his client, a resident of California (west), to appear for the first time not in Delaware, where the court is located, but remotely.
“Mr. Biden will plead innocent and there is no reason why he cannot say these two words by videoconference,” says his lawyer.
His accusation in this case, on September 14, occurred two days after the opening of the impeachment investigation procedure initiated by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives against the Democratic president.
Conservative MPs accuse Hunter Biden of making questionable deals in Ukraine and China by taking advantage of his father’s networks and name.
But they go even further by questioning possible unspeakable motivations for the pressure exerted on Kiev by Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s vice president, to obtain the dismissal of the Ukrainian attorney general, Viktor Chokine.
The prosecutor’s dismissal in 2016 came after coordinated efforts by the United States with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which accused him of covering up corruption and sabotaging government reforms.
Hunter Biden reached a plea deal with prosecutor David Weiss in June that covered charges of both tax evasion and illegal acquisition of firearms, which likely would have allowed him to avoid jail time and an embarrassing trial for himself and his father.
But this agreement was canceled after doubts expressed in July by a judge about the validity of the agreement.
His father’s predecessor, Donald Trump, and many other Republicans made Hunter Biden one of their favorite targets, seeing him as Joe Biden’s Achilles heel.
