US Presidents Joe Biden’s son Hunter indicted on gun charges

Hunter Biden was charged with two counts of making false statements, as well as for claiming on forms that he was not using drugs illegally at the time he bought a Colt revolver in Delaware.

A third charge said that, based on the false statements, he illegally possessed the gun — a charge that can bring up to 10 years in prison.

The charges were filed by the US Justice Department’s Special Counsel David Weiss, who has been investigating Mr Biden since 2018.

It came two months after a plea deal between Mr Biden and Mr Weiss, covering the gun charge as well as alleged tax violations, went sour over differences of whether the president’s son could face unspecified additional charges.

In the July deal, Mr Biden agreed to plea guilty to two minor tax charges. In exchange he was offered probation, as he had already paid what he owed the government along with penalties.

In the same deal, Mr Weiss agreed to suspend the felony gun charge if Mr Biden completed “pre-trial diversion,” which often involves counselling or rehabilitation.

But in a dramatic July 26 hearing, the deal collapsed over the issue of whether Mr Biden would have been immune from any other charges also investigated by Mr Weiss, including possible crimes related to his business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere.

The judge mentioned the possibility that Mr Biden could be charged as having acted as a lobbyist for foreign governments without registering with the Justice Department.

Three weeks later, after the deal collapsed, Mr Weiss dropped the tax charges and indicated in a court filing that new charges would be brought in other states.

And he told the Delaware court that an indictment on the gun charge would come by the end of September.

The legal troubles of Mr Biden, 53, a Yale-trained lawyer and lobbyist, have cast a shadow over his father Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.

Without offering any evidence, Republicans have accused Mr Biden’s Justice Department of protecting his son and have accused Mr Weiss, a Republican appointee, of going easy on Hunter.