A former FBI informant is set to plead guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.
Alexander Smirnov is expected to make the plea in Los Angeles to a felony charge in connection with the bogus story, along with a tax evasion charge stemming from a separate indictment accusing him of concealing millions of dollars of income, according to court papers.
Smirnov has been behind bars since his arrest in February on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015.
Prosecutors and the defense have agreed to recommend a sentence of between four and six years in prison, according to the plea agreement.
Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said.
But Smirnov had only routine business dealings with Burisma starting in 2017, according to court documents. An FBI field office investigated the allegations and recommended the case be closed in August 2020, according to charging documents.
No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous office as vice president.
While Smirnov’s identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, his claims played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark a House impeachment inquiry into Biden. Before Smirnov's arrest, Republicans had demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, though they acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if they were true.
During a September 2023 conversation with investigators, Smirnov also claimed the Russians probably had recordings of Hunter Biden because a hotel in Ukraine’s capital where he had stayed was “wired” and under their control — information he said was passed along to him by four high-level Russian officials.
But Hunter Biden had never traveled to Ukraine, according to Smirnov's indictment.
Smirnov claimed to have contacts with Russian intelligence-affiliated officials, and told authorities after his arrest this year that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.
The case against Smirnov was brought by special counsel David Weiss, who also prosecuted Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges. Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced this month after being convicted at a trial in the gun case and pleading guilty to federal charges in the tax case. But he was pardoned this month by his father, who said he believed “raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
President Joe Biden had long pledged that he would not pardon his son, Hunter, who was set to be sentenced this month for gun and tax convictions. But on Sunday, the president did just that.
The sweeping pardon covers not only Hunter Biden's convictions in two cases in Delaware and California, but also any other “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”
Biden is hardly the first president to deploy his pardon powers to benefit those close to him. But it was still a surprising reversal.
What's a pardon, anyway?
The U.S. Constitution says that a president has the power to grant clemency, which includes both pardons and commutations. A pardon forgives federal criminal offenses; a commutation reduces penalties but isn't as sweeping. The power has its roots in English law—the king could grant mercy to anyone—and it made it over the ocean to the American colonies and stuck around. The U.S. Supreme Court has found the presidential pardon authority to be very broad. And presidents use the power a lot: Donald Trump granted 237 acts of clemency during his four years in office and Barack Obama granted clemency 1,927 times in his eight years. Presidents have forgiven drug offenses, fraud convictions and Vietnam-era draft dodgers, among many other things.
But a president can only grant pardons for federal offenses, not state ones. Impeachment convictions also aren't pardonable.
What are the crimes Hunter Biden was accused of committing?
Hunter Biden was convicted in June of lying on a federal form when he purchased a gun in 2018 and swore that he wasn’t a drug user. Just months later, he pleaded guilty to charges accusing him of a scheme to avoid paying at least $1.4 million in taxes. Prosecutors alleged he lived lavishly while flouting the tax law, spending his cash on things like strippers and luxury hotels—“in short, everything but his taxes.”
Hunter Biden steps into a vehicle as he leaves federal court on Sept. 5, 2024, in Los Angeles, after pleading guilty to federal tax charges.
Both cases stemmed from a period in Hunter Biden’s life in which he struggled with drug and alcohol abuse before becoming sober in 2019.
After the gun trial aired salacious and unflattering details about Hunter Biden’s life, the president’s son said he agreed to plead guilty to the tax charges to spare his family another embarrassing criminal trial.
The tax trial was also expected to showcase details about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which Republicans have seized on to try to paint the Biden family as corrupt.
Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced this month in the two cases by judges in California and Delaware who were nominated to the bench by Trump.
Special counsel David Weiss’ office had not said whether prosecutors had planned to seek prison time. The tax charges carried up to 17 years behind bars and the gun charges were punishable by up to 25 years in prison, though federal sentencing guidelines were expected to call for far less time and it was possible the younger Biden would have avoided prison time entirely.
Didn’t Biden say he wouldn’t pardon his son?
Yes. Hunter Biden has been under federal investigation since 2020. He reached a deal with federal prosecutors and was supposed to plead guilty last year to misdemeanor tax offenses and would have avoided prosecution in the gun case as long he stayed out of trouble for two years.
But the plea hearing quickly unraveled when the judge raised concerns about unusual aspects of the deal. He was subsequently indicted in the two cases, and he’s claimed that he was singled out because he is the president’s son.
“I’m extremely proud of my son Hunter. He has overcome an addiction. He is one of the brightest, most decent men I know,” he said. “I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said as recently as Nov. 8 that Biden would not pardon his son.
President Joe Biden speaks on the South Lawn of the White House during a ceremony to commemorate World AIDS Day with survivors, their families and advocates, Sunday, Dec. 1, 2024, in Washington.
Why did Biden change his mind?
In his statement Sunday, Biden said that his son had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.” Biden has been concerned—as Hunter Biden was—about his political adversaries.
Also, the president is no longer running for office. He made his no-pardon pledge before he dropped out of the presidential race in June.
In his statement, the president said it was clear that his son was treated differently from other defendants in similar predicaments. The plea deal unraveled and Biden’s political opponents took credit for pressuring the process, he said.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son—and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter—who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me—and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
Have other presidents pardoned their family members or friends?
Yes. In his final weeks in office, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in law, Jared Kushner. He also pardoned multiple allies convicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Trump over the weekend announced plans to nominate the elder Kushner to be the U.S. envoy to France in his next administration.
President Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger Clinton in 2001, after he had completed a prison term for drug charges. Clinton also pardoned his former business partner Susan McDougal, who had been sentenced to two years in prison for her role in the Whitewater real estate deal.
Bondi is a longtime Trump ally and was one of his lawyers during his first impeachment trial, when he was accused — but not convicted — of abusing his power as he tried to condition U.S. military assistance to Ukraine on that country investigating then-former Vice President Joe Biden.
Bondi was among a group of Republicans who showed up to support Trump at his hush money criminal trial in New York that ended in May with a conviction on 34 felony counts. She's been a chair at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank set up by former Trump administration staffers.
“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans - Not anymore,” Trump said in a social media post. “Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again.”
Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. told Fox Business on Sunday that the transition team had backups in mind for his controversial nominees should they fail to get confirmed. The swift selection of Bondi came about six hours after Gaetz withdrew.
Matt Gaetz speaks to media outside the U.S. Capitol on June 11.
Gaetz stepped aside amid continued fallout over a federal sex trafficking investigation that cast doubt on his ability to be confirmed as the nation's chief federal law enforcement officer.
That announcement capped a turbulent eight-day period in which Trump sought to capitalize on his decisive election win to force Senate Republicans to accept provocative selections like Gaetz, who had been investigated by the Justice Department before being tapped last week to lead it. The decision could heighten scrutiny on other controversial Trump nominees, including Pentagon pick Pete Hegseth, who faces sexual assault allegations that he denies.
“While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Gaetz, a Florida Republican who one day earlier met with senators in an effort to win their support, said in a statement.
“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1," he added. Hours later, Gaetz posted on social media that he looks “forward to continuing the fight to save our country,” adding, “Just maybe from a different post.”
Trump, in a social media post, said: “I greatly appreciate the recent efforts of Matt Gaetz in seeking approval to be Attorney General. He was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the Administration, for which he has much respect. Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do!”
Screenshot of Donald Trump’s Truth Social post on Nov. 21 announcing Pam Bondi as his new attorney general nominee.
Collins is a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force Reserve Command. The Republican served in Congress from 2013 to 2021, and he helped defend Trump during his first impeachment process.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President-elect Donald Trump announced that he is nominating former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.
A former Republican congressman from Texas, Ratcliffe served as director of national intelligence for the final year and a half of Trump’s first term, leading the U.S. government’s spy agencies during the coronavirus pandemic. He is a more traditional pick for the role, which requires Senate confirmation, than some rumored loyalists pushed by some of Trump's supporters.
As intelligence director, he was criticized by Democrats for declassifying in the final days of the 2020 presidential election Russian intelligence alleging damaging information about Democrats during the 2016 race even though he acknowledged it might not be true.
After the Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Trump, Ratcliffe said: “This is the thinnest, fastest and weakest impeachment our country has ever seen.” He also forcefully questioned former special counsel Robert Mueller when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“I look forward to John being the first person ever to serve in both of our Nation’s highest Intelligence positions,” Trump said in a statement. “He will be a fearless fighter for the Constitutional Rights of all Americans, while ensuring the Highest Levels of National Security, and PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH.”
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Rep. Elise Stefanik to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations.
“Elise is an incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter,” Trump said in a statement Monday announcing his pick.
Nikki Haley, who challenged Trump for the GOP nomination, was among those who previously held the role in his first term.
Stefanik, 40, who serves as House Republican Conference Chair, has long been one of Trump's most loyal allies in the House, and was among those discussed as a potential vice presidential choice.
Born and raised in upstate New York, Stefanik graduated from Harvard and worked in former President George W. Bush’s White House on the domestic policy council and in the chief of staff’s office.
In 2014, at 30, she became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, representing upstate New York. She later became the youngest woman to serve in House leadership.
Stefanik was known early in her tenure as a more moderate conservative voice. But she soon attached herself to the former president, quietly remaking her image into that of a staunch MAGA ally — and seeing her power ascend.
She became the House Republican Conference Chair in 2021.
Stefanik spent years positioning herself as one of Trump’s most trusted allies and confidants on the Hill. She endorsed him in the 2024 race before he had even launched his bid, and aggressively campaigned on his behalf during the GOP primary.
She saw her profile rise after her aggressive questioning of a trio of university presidents over anti-Semitism on campus led to two of their resignations — a performance Trump repeatedly praised.
She also defended him vigorously in both of his impeachment trials and railed against his four criminal indictments, including filing an ethics complaint in New York against the judge who heard his civil fraud case.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump laid the groundwork to try to overturn the 2020 election even before he lost, knowingly pushed false claims of voter fraud and “resorted to crimes” in his failed bid to cling to power, according to a newly unsealed court filing from prosecutors that offers new evidence from the landmark criminal case against the former president.
The filing from special counsel Jack Smith's team offers the most comprehensive view to date of what prosecutors intend to prove if the case charging Trump with conspiring to overturn the election reaches trial. Though a months-long congressional investigation and the indictment itself have chronicled in stark detail Trump's efforts to undo the election, the filing cites previously unknown accounts offered by Trump's closest aides to paint a portrait of an “increasingly desperate” president who while losing his grip on the White House “used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process.”
“So what?” the filing quotes Trump as telling an aide after being alerted that his vice president, Mike Pence, was in potential danger after a crowd of violent Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to try to halt the counting of electoral votes.
“The details don't matter,” Trump said, when told by an adviser that a lawyer who was mounting his legal challenges wouldn’t be able to prove the false allegations in court, the filing states.
The brief was made public over the Trump legal team’s objections in the final month of a closely contested presidential race in which Democrats have sought to make Trump’s refusal to accept the election results four years ago central to their claims that he is unfit for office. The issue surfaced as recently as Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate when Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, recounted the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, while Republican opponent, Sen. JD Vance, refused to directly answer when asked whether Trump had lost the 2020 race.
The filing was submitted, initially under seal, following a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents for official acts they take in office, a decision that narrowed the scope of the prosecution and eliminated the possibility of a trial before next month's election.
The purpose of the brief is to persuade U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan that the offenses charged in the indictment are private, rather than official, acts and can therefore remain part of the case as it moves forward. Chutkan permitted a redacted version to be made public even though Trump's lawyers argued that it was unfair to unseal it so close to the election.
Though the prospects of a trial are uncertain, particularly in the event that Trump wins the presidency and a new attorney general dismisses the case, the brief nonetheless functions as a roadmap for the testimony prosecutors would elicit before a jury.
“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Smith’s team wrote, adding, “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office."
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung called the brief “falsehood-ridden” and “unconstitutional” and repeated oft-stated allegations that Smith and Democrats were “hell-bent on weaponizing the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power." Trump, in a separate post on his Truth Social platform, said the case would end with his “complete victory.”
The filing alleges that Trump “laid the groundwork” for rejecting the election results before the contest was over, telling advisers that in the event he held an early lead he would “declare victory before the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.”
Immediately after the election, prosecutors say, his advisers sought to sow chaos in the counting of votes. In one instance, a campaign employee, who is also described as a Trump co-conspirator, was told that results favoring Democrat Joe Biden at a Michigan polling center appeared accurate. The person is alleged to have replied: “find a reason it isnt” and “give me options to file litigation.”
The filing also includes details of conversations between Trump and Pence, including a private lunch the two had on Nov. 12, 2020, in which Pence “reiterated a face-saving option” for Trump, telling him, “don’t concede but recognize the process is over,” according to prosecutors.
In another private lunch days later, Pence urged Trump to accept the results of the election and run again in 2024.
“I don’t know, 2024 is so far off,” Trump told him, according to the filing.
But Trump “disregarded” Pence “in the same way he disregarded dozens of court decisions that unanimously rejected his and his allies’ legal claims, and that he disregarded officials in the targeted states — including those in his own party — who stated publicly that he had lost and that his specific fraud allegations were false,” prosecutors wrote.
The filing says by Dec. 5, the defendant was starting to think about Congress’ role in the process.
“For the first time, he mentioned to Pence the possibility of challenging the election results in the House of Representatives,” it says, citing a phone call.
Prosecutors also argue Trump used his Twitter account to further his illegal scheme by spreading false claims of election fraud, attacking “those speaking the truth” about his election loss and exhorting his supporters to travel to Washington for the Jan. 6, 2021, certification. They intend to use "forensic evidence” from Trump’s iPhone to provide insight into Trump’s actions after the mob of his supporters began to attack the Capitol.
Of the more than 1,200 Tweets Trump sent during the weeks detailed in the indictment, the vast majority were about the 2020 election, prosecutors say. They cite a slew of Trump tweets throughout the filing, including those falsely claiming Pence could reject electors even though the vice president had told Trump that he had no such power.
That “steady stream of disinformation” in the weeks after the election culminated in his speech at the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, in which Trump “used these lies to inflame and motivate the large and angry crowd of his supporters to march to the Capitol and disrupt the certification proceeding,” prosecutors wrote.
His “personal desperation was at its zenith” that morning as he was “only hours from the certification proceeding that spelled the end,” prosecutors wrote.
A judge agreed Friday to postpone Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case until after the November election, granting him a hard-won reprieve as he navigates the aftermath of his criminal conviction and the homestretch of his presidential campaign.
Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan, who is also weighing a defense request to overturn the verdict on immunity grounds, delayed Trump’s sentencing until Nov. 26, several weeks after the final votes are cast in the presidential election.
It had been scheduled for Sept. 18, about seven weeks before Election Day.
Merchan wrote that he was postponing the sentencing “to avoid any appearance—however unwarranted—that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate.”
“The Court is a fair, impartial, and apolitical institution,” he added.
Trump’s lawyers pushed for the delay on multiple fronts, petitioning the judge and asking a federal court to intervene. They argued that punishing the former president and current Republican nominee in the thick of his campaign to retake the White House would amount to election interference.
Trump’s lawyers argued that delaying his sentencing until after the election would also allow him time to weigh next steps after Merchan rules on the defense’s request to reverse his conviction and dismiss the case because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s July presidential immunity ruling.
Judge Juan M. Merchan
In his order Friday, Merchan delayed a decision on that until Nov. 12.
A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Trump’s request to have the U.S. District Court in Manhattan seize the case from Merchan’s state court. Had they been successful, Trump’s lawyers said they would have then sought to have the verdict overturned and the case dismissed on immunity grounds.
Trump is appealing the federal court ruling.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Trump’s case, deferred to Merchan and did not take a position on the defense’s delay request.
Messages seeking comment were left for Trump's lawyers and the district attorney's office.
Election Day is Nov. 5, but many states allow voters to cast ballots early, with some set to start the process just a few days before or after Sept. 18.
Trump was convicted in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election. Daniels claims she and Trump had a sexual encounter a decade earlier after they met at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.
Prosecutors cast the payout as part of a Trump-driven effort to keep voters from hearing salacious stories about him during his first presidential campaign. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels and was later reimbursed by Trump, whose company logged the reimbursements as legal expenses.
Trump maintains that the stories were false, that reimbursements were for legal work and logged correctly, and that the case—brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat—was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” aimed at damaging his current campaign.
Democrats backing their party’s nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, have made his conviction a focus of their messaging.
In speeches at the party’s conviction in Chicago last month, President Joe Biden called Trump a “convicted felon” running against a former prosecutor. Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas labeled Trump a “career criminal, with 34 felonies, two impeachments, and one porn star to prove it.”
Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, inspired chants of “lock him up” from the convention crowd when she quipped that Trump “fell asleep at his own trial, and when he woke up, he made his own kind of history: the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions.”
Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years behind bars. Other potential sentences include probation, a fine or a conditional discharge, which would require Trump to stay out of trouble to avoid additional punishment. Trump is the first ex-president convicted of a crime.
Trump has pledged to appeal, but that cannot happen until he is sentenced.
In seeking the delay, Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove argued that the short time between the scheduled immunity ruling on Sept. 16 and sentencing, which was to have taken place two days later, was unfair to Trump.
To prepare for a Sept. 18 sentencing, the lawyers said, prosecutors would be submitting their punishment recommendation while Merchan is still weighing whether to dismiss the case. If Merchan rules against Trump, he would need “adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options,” they said.
The Supreme Court’s immunity decision reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.
Trump’s lawyers argue that in light of the ruling, jurors in the hush money case should not have heard such evidence as former White House staffers describing how the then-president reacted to news coverage of the Daniels deal.
LOS ANGELES — Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to federal tax charges Thursday in a surprise move that spares President Joe Biden and his family another likely embarrassing and painful criminal trial of the president’s son.
Hunter Biden’s stunning decision to guilty plea to misdemeanor and felony charges without the benefits of a deal with prosecutors came hours after jury selection was supposed to begin in the case accusing him of failing to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes.
The president’s son was already facing potential prison time after his June conviction on felony gun charges in a trial that aired unflattering and salacious details about his struggles with a crack cocaine addiction. The tax trial was expected to showcase more potentially lurid evidence as well as details about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which Republicans have seized on to try to paint the Biden family as corrupt.
Although President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential election muted the potential political implications of the tax case, the trial was expected to carry a heavy emotional toll for the president in the final months of his five-decade political career.
“Enough is enough,” defense attorney Abbe Lowell told the judge before Hunter Biden entered his plea. “Mr. Biden is prepared, because of the public and private interest, to proceed today and finish this.”
Hunter Biden quickly responded “guilty” as the judge read out each of the nine counts. The charges carry up to 17 years behind bars, but federal sentencing guidelines are likely to call for a much shorter sentence. Sentencing is set for Dec. 16.
More than 100 potential jurors had been brought to the courthouse in Los Angeles on Thursday to begin the process of picking the panel to hear the case alleging a four-year scheme to avoid paying taxes while spending wildly on things like strippers, luxury hotels and exotic cars.
Prosecutors were caught off guard when Hunter Biden’s lawyer told the judge Thursday morning that Hunter wanted to enter what’s known as an Alford plea, under which a defendant maintains their innocence but acknowledges prosecutors have enough evidence to secure a conviction.
Prosecutors said they objected to such a plea, telling the judge that Hunter Biden “is not entitled to plead guilty on special terms that apply only to him.”
“Hunter Biden is not innocent. Hunter Biden is guilty,” prosecutor Leo Wise said.
Hunter Biden held hands with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, as he entered the courtroom on Sept. 5.
Hunter Biden walked into the courtroom holding hands with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and flanked by Secret Service agents. Initially, he pleaded not guilty to the charges related to his 2016 through 2019 taxes and his attorneys had indicated they would argue he didn’t act “willfully,” or with the intention to break the law, in part because of his well-documented struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.
Hunter Biden had agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses last year in a deal with the Justice Department that would allow him to avoid prosecution in the gun case if he stayed out of trouble. But the agreement imploded after a judge questioned unusual aspects of it, and he was subsequently indicted in the two cases.
His decision to change his plea Thursday came after the judge issued some unfavorable pre-trial rulings for the defense, including rejecting a proposed defense expert lined up to testify about addiction.
Scarsi, who was appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump, also placed some restrictions on what jurors would be allowed to hear about the traumatic events that Hunter Biden's family, friends and attorneys say led to his drug addiction.
The judge barred attorneys from connecting his substance abuse struggles to the 2015 death of his brother Beau Biden from cancer or the car accident that killed his mother and sister when he was a toddler.
The indictment alleged that Hunter Biden lived lavishly while flouting the tax law, spending his cash on things like strippers and luxury hotels — “in short, everything but his taxes.”
Hunter Biden’s attorneys had asked Scarsi to also limit prosecutors from highlighting details of his expenses that they say amount to a “character assassination,” including payments made to strippers or pornographic websites. The judge has said in court papers that he will maintain “strict control” over the presentation of potentially salacious evidence.
Prosecutors had said they want to introduce evidence about Hunter Biden’s overseas dealings, which have been at the center of Republican investigations into the Biden family often seeking — without evidence— to tie the president to an alleged influence peddling scheme.
The special counsel’s team had planned to have a business associate of Hunter Biden's testify about their work for a Romanian businessman, who prosecutors say sought to “influence U.S. government policy” while Joe Biden was vice president.
Sentencing in Hunter Biden's Delaware conviction is set for Nov. 13. He could face up to 25 years in prison in that case, though he is likely to get far less time or avoid prison entirely.
As Vice President Kamala Harris begins her fall campaign for the White House, she can look to history and hope for better luck than others in her position who have tried the same.
Since 1836, only one sitting vice president, George H.W. Bush in 1988, has been elected to the White House. Among those who tried and failed were Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000. All three lost in narrow elections shaped by issues ranging from war and scandal to crime and the subtleties of televised debates. But two other factors proved crucial for each vice president: whether the incumbent president was well-liked and whether the president and vice president enjoyed a productive relationship.
“You really do want those elements to come together,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “If the person the vice president is working for is popular, that means people like what he’s doing and you can gain from that. And you need to have the two principals working together.”
In 1988, Bush easily defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor whom Republicans labeled as ineffectual and out of touch. Bush was otherwise helped by a solid economy, the easing of Cold War tensions and some rare luck for a vice president. President Ronald Reagan's approval ratings rose through much of the year after falling sharply in the wake of the 1986-87 Iran-Contra scandal, and Reagan and Bush worked well together during the campaign. Reagan openly backed his vice president, who had run against him in the 1980 primaries. He praised Bush at the Republican convention as an engaged and invaluable partner, appeared with him at a California rally and spoke at gatherings in Michigan, New Jersey and Missouri.
President George H.W. Bush
“Reagan was not a man to hold grudges,” said historian-journalist Jonathan Darman. “And Bush did a good job of navigating the complexity of their relationship while he was vice president.”
Past vice presidents who ran
When Gore ran in 2000, his advantages were similar to those enjoyed by George H.W. Bush. The economy was strong, the country was at peace and the president, Bill Clinton, had high approval ratings despite his recent impeachment over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Gore had worked closely with Clinton over the previous eight years, but the scandal led to enduring tensions between them. He minimized the president’s presence during the campaign and pronounced himself “my own man” during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Commentators would cite his distance from Clinton as a setback in a historically close race, decided by a margin of fewer than 1,000 votes in Florida.
“Instead of finding a way to embrace the accomplishments of the Clinton administration, Gore ran away from Clinton as fast as his legs could carry him,” Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote soon after the election.
Like Gore, Nixon could not — or would not — capitalize on the incumbent Dwight Eisenhower's popularity. In 1960, Eisenhower was still so admired as he neared the end of his second term that Nixon's opponent, Democrat John F. Kennedy, feared the president's active support would prove critical. But Eisenhower and Nixon had a complicated relationship dating back to when Eisenhower ran eight years earlier. He had chosen Nixon as his running mate, but nearly dropped him because of the so-called Checkers scandal, in which Nixon was accused of misusing funds donated by political backers.
Nixon was more than 20 years younger than Eisenhower, the victorious World War II commander who often looked upon his vice president as a junior officer, according to Nixon biographer John A. Farrell. At the end of a summer press conference in 1960, Eisenhower was asked if he could cite Nixon's influence on any important decision. He answered, “If you give me a week, I might think of one." Meanwhile, Nixon was reluctant to have Eisenhower campaign, out of a desire to forge his own path, and, allegedly, out of concern for the 70-year-old president.
“Nixon very much wanted to be his own man,” says Farrell, whose prize-winning “Richard Nixon" was published in 2017. “He always said he was worried about Eisenhower's health, but there are also anecdotes that Eisenhower was chafing at the bit. Both could be true.”
Nixon's luck changed when he ran eight years later against Lyndon B. Johnson's vice president. No vice president was more entrapped by his predecessor than Hubert Humphrey, whose candidacy was only possible because Johnson decided not to seek reelection.
Humphrey faced challenges within the party from the anti-war candidates Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy (who was assassinated in June 1968 after winning the California primary) and was tied to Johnson's divisive, hawkish stance.
Humphrey privately advocated a less hardline approach to the war, but Johnson intimidated him into silence and he trailed Nixon badly in many polls. Only in the fall did Humphrey diverge and call for a bombing halt with North Vietnam. The vice president rallied, but ended up losing the popular vote by less than a percentage point while falling short more decisively in the Electoral College.
“Johnson did catastrophic damage to Humphrey, in my opinion,” says Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen, author of a book on the 1968 election, “American Carnage.”
How does Harris fare?
Like Johnson, President Joe Biden declared he wouldn’t seek a new term less than a year before Election Day, though he waited much longer in the cycle than Johnson did. Unlike Humphrey, Harris quickly consolidated Democratic support and accepted her party’s nomination at an uplifting convention that concluded without significant damage from protests, unlike the violence-marred 1968 event in the same city, Chicago.
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris
In an AP-NORC survey conducted in July, after Biden dropped out of the race, about 4 in 10 Americans approved of his performance as president, roughly where his approval numbers have stood since the summer of 2021 and comparable to those of the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. Eisenhower, Reagan and Clinton frequently held higher approval ratings than Biden, although all served in less polarized eras.
Harris wants to succeed a president who himself served as vice president and ran for president, four years later. President Barack Obama discouraged Biden from seeking election in 2016 and waited to endorse Biden in 2020 until the crowded Democratic primary field was clear.
“Obama became an enthusiastic backer, which helped unify the party at a time when Biden’s record on race in the 1990s, including his support for the crime bill, was fueling doubts among young progressive voters,” Biden biographer Evan Osnos says. “Obama’s endorsement of Biden was about more than his candidacy; it was about his character, and that proved to be important.”
As president, Biden has worked to include Harris on his major policy calls and conversations with foreign leaders. He’s pledged to be Harris’ top campaign volunteer and to do whatever she asks of him for her election, though aides are still determining where the still-unpopular president would best be utilized. On Labor Day, Biden and Harris will appear together in Pittsburgh for a campaign event in a key swing state, Pennsylvania.
