Hotels, drugs, and women: DOJ says Hunter Biden spent millions on 'everything but his taxes'

The Department of Justice’s indictment of Hunter Biden lays out in elaborate detail allegations that the president’s son willfully failed to pay four years’ worth of taxes even though he had the means to pay some or all of them.

Special counsel David Weiss detailed how Biden would "earn handsomely and spend wildly" from 2016 through 2019.

HUNTER BIDEN INDICTED ON CRIMINAL TAX CHARGES IN CALIFORNIA

Weiss said Biden's roughly $4.9 million in personal expenses during that time frame went toward stays at four-star hotels, female escorts, luxury cars, and more than a million dollars in cash withdrawals that coincided with a drug addiction.

His money went toward "everything but his taxes," Weiss said.

Weiss charged Biden with three felonies and six misdemeanors, including failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes for the years 2016 to 2019, failing to file taxes for the years 2017 and 2018, and filing false and fraudulent tax returns for 2018.

Biden personally raked in more than $7 million in gross income during the tax years in question through various foreign business deals.

Some of his expenses from 2016 to 2019 were summarized in the indictment as follows:

• $1.6 million on cash withdrawals
• $683,212 on payments to "various women"
• $188,960 on "adult entertainment"
• $397,530 on clothing and accessories

• $48,012 on entertainment and sports

The 2018 tax year was particularly problematic, according to the indictment. Biden failed to file his tax returns on time that year, and when he did finally file them in 2020, he made false deductions to ease his tax burden, Weiss alleged.

Below are some of the allegations against Biden related to the 2018 charges:

• Biden allegedly claimed on his tax forms that he spent nearly $400,000 on "business-related travel" despite having none.

• Biden allegedly failed to categorize numerous expenses as "personal" on his tax forms, including a $1,500 expense on an exotic dancer at a strip club. He described the transaction, made through Venmo, as “artwork” despite receiving no artwork from the dancer, according to Weiss.
• Biden allegedly paid $11,500 for two nights with an escort but did not claim that as a personal expense.

• Biden allegedly claimed a $3,852 payment to rent a Lamborghini was a business expense. He drove that in 2018 "until his Porsche was shipped from the East Coast."
• Biden allegedly falsely claimed he spent $86,000 on "wages." The funds were, according to Weiss, actually related to Biden placing "on payroll and [providing] health care benefits to three women with whom he had romantic or sexual relationships and a fourth woman who was related to one of those women.” Three of the women did no work for him, while one, with whom he had a "sexual relationship," worked at one point as his personal assistant by running errands for him, Weiss alleged.
• When accountants were relying on Biden in 2020 to provide information about his 2018 expenditures so that they could prepare his returns, Biden allegedly did not mention his drug habit. Weiss noted that data point would have likely raised a red flag with the accountants regarding Biden’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in "business expenses" that year. Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, about how in 2018, he was “dominated by crack cocaine use ‘twenty-four hours a day, smoking every fifteen minutes, seven days a week.’”
• Biden wrote in his memoir that he poured money into “thieves, junkies, petty dealers, over-the-hill strippers, con artists, and assorted hangers-on, who then invited their friends and associates and most recent hookups. They latched on to me and didn’t let go, all with my approval.”

• Biden wrote in his memoir that he bounced around Malibu and Hollywood Hills, California, in 2018 while living out of AirBnBs and four-star hotels, such as the historic Chateau Marmont, drinking expensive champagne, and partying with strippers. He falsely wrote off his hotel stays as business expenses, Weiss alleged.

Biden has said he became sober by the middle of 2019, and Weiss alleged that the first son's extravagant lifestyle continued well beyond that time:

• The indictment does not identify him by name but describes how Kevin Morris, an entertainment lawyer, paid $1.2 million on behalf of Biden to fund his expensive lifestyle in 2020 while some of his taxes remained unpaid.

• Morris paid $200,000 in 2020 for Biden "to rent a lavish house on a canal" in Venice Beach.

• Morris paid $11,000 in car payments in 2020 for Biden's Porsche.

Morris, a prominent Democratic donor, also began helping Biden pay off his taxes in 2020 as concerns mounted about the political risk Biden posed at the time while his father was in the throes of his presidential campaign.

Biden's lawyer Abbe Lowell appeared on Friday on MSNBC, where he said his client "paid his taxes back with interest and penalties two years ago."

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Lowell characterized the indictment as unfair, pointing to a failed plea agreement from the summer through which Weiss initially planned to allow Biden to plead guilty to only two tax misdemeanors. Lowell said Weiss caved to "enormous" political pressure from Republicans by "reneging" on the agreement and instead bringing the more serious charges.

Lowell added that Biden's personal indulgences during the years cited on the indictment occurred "at the depths of his addiction" and that it was "not behavior that he's proud of, but it doesn't make him into a tax felon."