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.
The Heritage Foundation initially submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in July, seeking DOJ records and communications indicating whether the DOJ or Mr. Weiss were considering charging the president’s son with violations of the Mann Act, a 1910 federal law that prohibits transporting individuals across state lines for the purpose of prostitution. On Monday, the Heritage Foundation filed a lawsuit in federal court in Delaware, accusing the DOJ and Mr. Weiss of failing to produce the records the conservative think tank had requested.
The initial FOIA request references a June testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, in which IRS agent Joseph Ziegler indicated that federal authorities had indeed considered several pieces of evidence that might support charges under the Mann Act. Mr. Ziegler and another IRS agent, Gary Shapley, both went public in recent months with allegations that DOJ officials hindered efforts to investigate the president’s son.
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.
Federal prosecutors referenced additional instances of Mr. Biden allegedly paying for exotic dancers and escorts in a criminal complaint filed in California federal court last week.
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.
NTD News reached out to attorneys representing Mr. Biden for comment about the Heritage Foundation’s FOIA lawsuit. His attorneys did not respond by press time.
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.
Mr. Biden’s legal team filed their own federal lawsuit in September, accusing the IRS of breaching his privacy and allowing unauthorized disclosures of his tax information, citing Mr. Ziegler and Mr. Shapley’s various public comments on investigations involving the president’s son.
This week, Mr. Biden’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss the new Delaware gun charges, arguing the president’s son sacrificed his constitutional pretrial rights to reach the now-defunct plea deal. The motion argues that the defunct plea deal still binds the DOJ to a commitment not to pursue charges similar to those it had described in the plea deal; charges like those Mr. Weiss’s team is currently pursuing in California and Delaware.
In a podcast appearance that aired last week, Mr. Biden also argued that his father’s political adversaries are trying to “kill” him or otherwise cause his father to fear for his son’s continued well-being, all in an alleged effort to destabilize the Biden presidency.