The conservative Heritage Foundation is seeking to force the U.S. Department of Justice and Special Counsel David Weiss to divulge records as to whether they'd weighed investigating or charging President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, with sex trafficking charges.
Mr. Ziegler told lawmakers that Mr. Biden had deducted expenditures from his taxes for a person he called his assistant but whom investigators believed was a known prostitute.
“There were some flying people across state lines, paying for their travel, paying for their hotels. They were what we call Mann Act violations,” Mr. Zeigler further testified.
The California complaint described one $1,500 payment that Mr. Biden allegedly made in August of 2018 to “an exotic dancer, at a strip club” for “artwork,” before stating “the exotic dancer had not sold him any artwork.” The complaint described another $1,248 in payments Mr. Biden had characterized as a business expense, that prosecutors believe was used to pay for “an exotic dancer to fly from Los Angeles to New York in September 2018.” The criminal complaint also described numerous payments for escorts, including “$11,500 for an escort paid by the Defendant to spend two nights with him.”
The Heritage Foundation’s lawsuit argues Mr. Weiss’s office has failed to assert why the records they are seeking may be exempt from disclosure under FOIA. The conservative think tank’s lawsuit seeks to compel the DOJ and Mr. Weiss’s office to search for and turn over any non-exempt documents they had requested in their initial FOIA request.
Other Legal Hurdles
Mr. Biden is currently facing federal prosecution in Delaware for three unrelated charges for allegedly lying about his drug use to purchase a gun, and breaking another federal law that prohibits “habitual drug users” from possessing firearms. He faces nine additional charges in California, including two felony offenses for tax evasion, another felony offense for filing a false tax return, and six misdemeanor tax offenses for failure to file and pay tax returns.The two federal indictments come after the collapse of a plea agreement between Mr. Weiss and Mr. Biden, in which the president’s son would have plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and entered a pretrial diversion program that would have allowed him to avoid jail time for gun-related offenses.