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      Jill Biden Leaves France to Attend Hunter Biden’s Trial

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      The first lady’s departure from a high-profile foreign trip was a dramatic illustration of the Biden family’s personal priorities. She is expected to return to France on Saturday.Jill Biden, the first lady, left President Biden’s side in France on Thursday to make the trans-Atlantic trip back to Delaware, where Hunter Biden is standing trial on gun charges.The first lady is then scheduled to return to France for a state visit on Saturday, according to her communications director, Elizabeth Alexander.The departure of the first lady from a high-profile foreign trip was perhaps the most dramatic illustration yet of the Biden family’s personal priorities, which lie some 3,600 miles away from France, in Courtroom 4A of the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building in Wilmington, Del.Hunter Biden is on trial on charges of lying about his drug use on a form to buy a gun in October 2018, and of illegally possessing the weapon.The boomerang trip also says something about the resolve of the first lady, who is not a blood relative of Hunter Biden but who is the woman who raised him since he was a small child. Over time, she has become her family’s protective backbone.“I’m his mom,” she said in an interview in 2022, when Hunter Biden was the subject of a federal investigation. “I mean, I have to support him and love him, and, you know, I’m constantly talking to him, sending him texts; ‘How you doing?’ Because it’s tough.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hallie Biden Is a Key Witness in Hunter Biden Gun Trial

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      Hallie Biden, Mr. Biden’s ex-girlfriend and the widow of his brother, Beau, described his self-destructive behavior around the time he applied for a gun in 2018.Hallie Biden, a former girlfriend of Hunter Biden and widow of his brother, Beau, took the stand on Thursday, telling jurors that she saw him buy, stash and smoke vast amounts of crack cocaine in the fall of 2018 when he claimed to be drug-free on a firearms application.Ms. Biden — speaking in nervous, clipped bursts as she faced Mr. Biden across the fourth-floor courtroom — admitted that he had introduced her to crack in the summer of 2018. She said she was ashamed and embarrassed by their behavior when the two briefly lived together in a rented house in Annapolis, Md., a time when both were in shock over Beau Biden’s death.“It was a terrible experience that I went through,” she said.Ms. Biden is, by far, the most important witness for the prosecution, offering the most detailed, and intimate, portrait of Mr. Biden’s reckless and self-destructive behavior at the time.Mr. Biden, she said, bought multiple rocks of crack in Washington, where he kept an apartment — some the size of “Ping-Pong balls, or bigger maybe” — and stored them in his “backpack or car.”Ms. Biden said she discovered the gun at the center of the case when she was rifling through Mr. Biden’s vehicle the morning after he showed up at her house. It was part of a “pattern” of erratic behavior, she added, saying he would be unreachable for weeks at a time and she or her children would scrounge through his car for drugs or alcohol to help him “start anew and deal with stuff” when he reappeared exhausted at her home.When she searched the car on Oct. 23, she described noticing “a dusting of powder” that she assumed to be “remnants of crack cocaine” before finding the gun in a case with a broken lock. Flustered, she said she improvised a way to dispose of it at a grocery store nearby.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hunter Biden’s Trial: A Routine Gun Case, but Abnormal in Every Way

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      At Hunter Biden’s trial, he listened with the jury to his own voice on the audio version of his memoir. “We’ve all been inside rooms we can’t afford to die in,’’ he heard himself say.When the federal prosecutor, Derek Hines, began his opening statement with the words “no man is above the law,” it signified the only rhetorical acknowledgment to the jury that the trial of Hunter Biden was not an ordinary gun charge.Mr. Hines seemed intent on trying a seemingly run-of-the-mill case of a drug addict charged with illegally purchasing a firearm. In doing so, however, it was as if he had instructed the 12 jurors, in the manner of the wizard in “The Wizard of Oz,” to pay no attention to the extraordinary spectacle plainly in view.Pay no attention to the defendant’s last name, the most famous one in Wilmington. Pay no attention to the first lady, Jill Biden, sitting in the front row behind the defendant, whom she raised as her own son. Pay no attention to Mr. Biden’s famous attorney, Abbe Lowell, or to the millionaire Hollywood lawyer also in the front row, Kevin Morris, who is largely bankrolling his friend Mr. Biden’s legal defense.And pay no attention to the 50 or so members of the media taking up most of the spectator space — among them a documentary film team paid for by Mr. Morris.The 12 jurors were left to deduce these matters on their own. Several of them stole glances at the defendant, as if trying to square the image of the 54-year-old man in the dark suit, flag lapel pin and tortoiseshell reading glasses with the crack addict described in the testimony. At one point, Mr. Biden flashed a genetically familiar broad smile while talking to Mr. Lowell during a courtroom break.For the most part, however, the defendant looked the somber part of a man facing up to 25 years in prison. He sat impassively, listening along with the jury to his own voice reciting the audio version of his memoir, “Beautiful Things,” including the observation, “We’ve all been inside rooms we can’t afford to die in.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Obama Is a Surprise Guest Among Allies at Biden’s State Dinner for Kenya

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      The state dinner was held in honor of the African nation, but it was clear that the night was about keeping Democratic allies close as President Biden heads into the heat of the 2024 campaign season.Yes, Barack Obama was there.State dinners are best known as bear hugs for overseas allies, and Thursday’s honoree was Kenya. But the sixth state dinner of President Biden’s term was designed to clutch domestic allies — not the least of them Mr. Obama, whose father was Kenyan — even tighter as the president makes the long slog toward November.The 500-person event, held on the South Lawn of the White House on a humid May evening, was attended by dozens of influential Kenyans, of course. The list included President William Ruto of Kenya and his wife, Rachel, along with three of his daughters. It also included some of the country’s wealthiest figures, like James Mwangi, the chief executive of the global banking conglomerate Equity Group Holdings Limited.“We share a strong respect for the history that connects us together,” Mr. Biden said to his guests during a toast. He quoted from a speech given by President Jimmy Carter, who honored Kenya with a state dinner in 1980: “Neighbors do not share a border but share beliefs.”But the evening, along with the guest list, was just as notable for what it said about Mr. Biden’s current political obstacles. Aside from Mr. Obama — the former president was not on the initial guest list published by the White House, and he departed before Mr. Biden’s speech — the list name-checked the people Mr. Biden will want to bring closer into the fold in the months ahead. The lineup included elected officials in several battleground states, influential Black political operatives, and powerful philanthropists, like Melinda French Gates.Choosing their guests, the president and Jill Biden, the first lady, mixed supporters of the president’s re-election effort with several Biden family members — granddaughters and Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, who is scheduled to stand trial on gun charges next month. (Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, walked the red carpet alone.) There were few Hollywood types, though one notable attendee was the actor Sean Penn. Mr. Penn was photographed by the gossip website TMZ as he spent time with Hunter Biden, who has been working on a documentary about his life, in California earlier this month.Hunter Biden and the actor Sean Penn listened to President William Ruto of Kenya as he spoke at the dinner.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Rejects Hunter Biden Claim of Selective Prosecution in Gun Case

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      Judge Maryellen Noreika declined to dismiss the charges against the president’s son, saying Mr. Biden’s lawyer failed to show prosecutors had been motivated by animus.The federal judge presiding over Hunter Biden’s gun case in Delaware on Friday rejected Mr. Biden’s claim that he was being subjected to selective prosecution, saying it was “nonsensical” that the Biden Justice Department would target the president’s son.Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, has filed a flurry of motions in the Delaware gun case and a separate indictment in California on tax charges, accusing the government of unfairly singling out his client at the instigation of Republicans and seeking to dismiss the charges. None of those challenges have been successful so far.Judge Maryellen Noreika, who scuttled a plea deal reached between prosecutors and Mr. Biden last summer, said that Mr. Lowell failed to provide evidence that prosecutors had been motivated by animus against Hunter Biden.The “defendant’s claim is effectively that his own father targeted him for being his son, a claim that is nonsensical under the facts here,” Judge Noreika wrote in her 25-page decision.The judge also rejected Mr. Lowell’s claim that David C. Weiss, the special counsel and U.S. attorney in Delaware, had only decided to bring charges against Hunter Biden because of pressure from Republicans in Congress who claimed attempts to reach a plea agreement last year were a “sweetheart deal” intended to protect the Bidens.“Regardless of whether congressional Republicans attempted to influence the executive branch, there is no evidence that they were successful in doing so,” she wrote.A federal grand jury in Wilmington indicted Hunter Biden in September on charges that he lied about his drug use on an application for a Colt pistol in 2018.In response to a question on the form about whether he was using drugs, Mr. Biden said he was not, an assertion that prosecutors concluded was false. Mr. Biden has publicly acknowledged his struggles with addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol and had been in and out of rehab around the time of the gun purchase.If convicted, Mr. Biden could face up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. But nonviolent first-time offenders who have not been accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely get serious prison time for the charges.The decision to file criminal charges against President Biden’s troubled son was an extraordinary step for the Justice Department and Mr. Weiss after the last-minute collapse of a deal that would have granted Hunter Biden broad immunity from future prosecution on gun and tax charges without serving prison time.In December, a separate federal grand jury in Los Angeles charged the president’s son with a scheme to evade federal taxes on millions in income from foreign businesses.Hunter Biden faces three counts each of evasion of a tax assessment, failure to file and pay taxes, and filing a false or fraudulent tax return, according to the 56-page indictment.Both trials are scheduled to begin in June, although the schedules are subject to change. More

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      Ex-FBI Informant, Accused of Biden Lies, Said He Had Russian Contacts

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      Federal prosecutors portrayed the former informant, Alexander Smirnov, 43, as a serial liar incapable of telling the truth about even the most basic details of his own life.A former F.B.I. informant accused of making false bribery claims about President Biden and his son Hunter — which were widely publicized by Republicans — claimed to have been fed information by Russian intelligence, according to a court filing on Tuesday.In the memo, prosecutors portrayed the former informant, Alexander Smirnov, 43, as a serial liar incapable of telling the truth about even the most basic details of his own life. But Mr. Smirnov told federal investigators that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.Those disclosures, including Mr. Smirnov’s unverifiable claim that he met with Russian intelligence officials as recently as three months ago, made him a flight risk and endangered national security, Justice Department officials said. Mr. Smirnov had been held in custody in Las Vegas, where he has lived since 2022, since his arrest last week.He was released from custody on Tuesday on a personal recognizance bond after a detention hearing, said his lawyers, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld.Prosecutors did not specify which story Russian intelligence is said to have been fed to Mr. Smirnov, an Israeli citizen. But they suggested they could not believe anything he said. And they had many tales to choose from.The memo describes Mr. Smirnov as a human hall of mirrors: He fed the F.B.I. bogus information about the Bidens and misled prosecutors about his wealth, estimated at $6 million, while telling them he worked in the security business, even though the government could find no proof that was true.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Even in Washington, Weasel Words Will Only Get You So Far

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      Gail Collins: Hey, Bret, would you hate it if I asked for a couple of predictions for 2024?Bret Stephens: Gail, it would be better if you asked me for my prediction for the year 2112. That way, hardly anybody will remember how wrong I was and I won’t be around for them to remind me. But here’s my 2024 prediction anyway: Trump is elected president again, and we become neighbors in Toronto.Now your turn.Gail: OK, Donald Trump is going to be campaigning for president while on trial for an astonishing range of crimes. Meanwhile, we’ll shiver with fear every time Joe Biden coughs. But in the end, I predict the nation will square its collective shoulders and elect the better man, even if he’s beginning to look like an old 81.Bret: Biden has a 37 percent approval rating, according to Gallup, and Trump is running four points ahead of him in the latest Wall Street Journal poll — or six points, if you factor in third-party and independent candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. This is beginning to have the makings of an epochal disaster, not just for the country but for Western civilization. Yet Democrats are driving at high speed toward a rock wall because they don’t want to tell Grandpa that he no longer should be allowed to get behind the wheel or even suggest he replace his vice president with someone more … confidence-inducing.Gail: Here’s a pre-new year prediction: In stores around the nation, children — and their parents — will stand in line to sit on Santa’s lap and beg him to bring them a different presidential race.Bret: Nikki Haley against Gretchen Whitmer — how much fun would that be? But we are where we are. Pass the absinthe.Changing the subject: Did you watch the testimony of the university presidents?Gail: Yeah, Claudine Gay of Harvard is probably going to be haunted for the rest of her life for having said “it depends on the context” when asked whether calling for genocide of the Jews violated Harvard’s rules against bullying and harassment.Bret: Along with Elizabeth Magill, the now-former president of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth, the president of M.I.T. Just imagine the reaction to any university president saying “it depends on the context” as to whether calling for the genocide of, say, Black or Asian people is permissible. It was heartening to see Democrats and Republicans alike taking them to task for such colossally stupid answers, even if it’s hard to find myself on the same side with an election denier like Elise Stefanik.Gail: In the world of higher education, free speech is a cardinal virtue and leaders learn how to get past questions that would force them to call for anything that sounds like censorship.Magill framed her answer in what sounded like a weaselly dodge, but I’m sorry she felt compelled to resign.Bret: I’m against cancel culture on principle, so I hope Gay, who apologized for her remarks, and Kornbluth, who hasn’t — at least as far as I know — don’t follow Magill out the door. There needs to be space for contrition and learning.I’m also a fervent believer in free expression, including at private universities that don’t have a legal obligation to abide by the strictures of the First Amendment. The problem is that universities like Harvard often enforce rules against hate speech when it comes to heinous statements against some minority groups, but they invoke free speech when it comes to heinous statements about Jews. That double standard lies at the root of the antisemitism that pervades too many campuses. If colleges were truly serious about free speech, they would work a lot harder to pierce the left-wing bubble that so many college campuses have become.The other big national story from last week is Hunter Biden’s indictment on tax evasion charges. Your thoughts?Gail: Well, we’ve been down this road before. Hunter is certainly in a ton of trouble on the tax front, but I don’t believe voters will hold his problems against his father.Bret: We’ll see.Gail: Joe Biden is a man who, early in his political career, lost his wife and daughter in a terrible car accident. Then later he lost a beloved son — the star of the next generation of Bidens in the political world — to cancer.Hunter was the offspring who was always getting into trouble. Many families have one and God knows he’s caused his father a lot of grief. The message the country should be getting from all this is that our president is a leader who can work through incredible personal pain for the common good.Bret: I think we both recognize that the president has suffered through a lot — and having a surviving son with a longstanding drug habit has been part of the suffering. He has my sympathy.But Joe’s political problem is that Hunter’s story keeps getting worse — and parts of it suggest attempts to conceal the full truth. Before the election, Joe claimed that Hunter’s lost-and-found laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. False. He said he knew nothing about his son’s business dealings and never got involved. False. David Weiss, the special counsel appointed by Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general, was about to give Hunter a sweetheart plea bargain. The judge rejected it, and now Hunter has been hit with tax evasion charges that could end up in a long prison sentence.Gail: The last was a punishment for being Joe’s son. A normal defendant would have had no problem getting that deal approved. A normal well-lawyered defendant, anyway.Bret: He’s accused of evading more than $1 million in taxes and spending it on drugs and, uh, companionship. And Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that paid Hunter a fortune to sit on its board when Joe was vice president — with a special responsibility to help clean up Ukrainian corruption — cut Hunter’s salary in half after Obama left office.Gail: Don’t think even the Bidens’ best friends believed Burisma hired Hunter for his depth of knowledge on energy issues in post-Soviet republics. But let’s just say it’s not unusual for the children of powerful men and women to get jobs because of their names.If there were serious stories about Joe using his political muscle to, say, get Burisma a special government contract, that would be a different matter.Bret: At a minimum, all of this will help Trump neutralize some of the ethical and legal charges against him, at least with some wavering voters, the way Bill Clinton’s record of sexual misconduct neutralized Trump’s vulnerabilities on that score. But if there are other shoes to drop, it will turn into an even bigger political liability for an already vulnerable president.Gail: Praying all the shoes are already on the floor. But I think the Republicans are flirting with trouble when they tie all this into an impeachment crusade. Just gonna remind the public that Trump was the only president in American history to be impeached twice.Bret: Do they even remember? Stalin supposedly said that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic. I propose a corollary for Trump: A single criminal indictment against a former president is a disgrace, but 91 counts is a blur.Gail: OK, gonna quote that one in 2024.Bret: Gail, we’ve made it a December tradition to mention charities we admire and support. Do you have a recommendation for our readers?Gail: First, can I say kudos to the many readers who provide ongoing support for projects that help the poor, educate the neglected, protect the environment and do so many other great things?Bret: You may indeed.Gail: I’m happy to recommend La Mision Children’s Fund in El Cajon, Calif. It fights hunger and works to improve education in impoverished communities in Mexico near the California border. With all the current hysteria over border politics, it’s a particularly good time to encourage something so sensible.Your turn.Bret: Rails-to-Trails conservancy. It has been around since the 1980s, working for the creation of biking and walking trails across the country, including a trail that will eventually connect Washington, D.C., to the state of Washington. Conservatives and liberals will always have differences, but we should be able to agree on the importance of conservation, of urban and rural renewal, and creating great public spaces that can be enjoyed by everyone.Gail: Once again we’re in accord. Although the disaccords are always fun, too. Happy holidays on both fronts, Bret.Bret: Gail, before we go, I want to put in a word for our colleague Megan Stack’s brilliantly reported and beautifully written essay on life for Palestinians in the West Bank. I’ve known Megan for more than 20 years, when we both worked in Jerusalem. And while we are on opposite sides of this subject, politically speaking, I have nothing but respect for the deep sense of humanity she brings to everything she writes. We need to preserve our intellectual humility by paying attention to those with whom we disagree, sometimes passionately. The alternative really is the abyss.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Hunter Biden Charged With Evading Taxes on Millions From Foreign Firms

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      The Justice Department charged President Biden’s son after a long-running and wide-ranging investigation with substantial political repercussions.A federal grand jury charged Hunter Biden on Thursday with a scheme to evade federal taxes on millions in income from foreign businesses, the second indictment against him this year and a major new development in a case Republicans have made the cornerstone of a possible impeachment of President Biden.Mr. Biden, the president’s son, faces three counts each of evasion of a tax assessment, failure to file and pay taxes, and filing a false or fraudulent tax return, according to the 56-page indictment — a withering play-by-play of personal indulgence with potentially enormous political costs for his father.The charges, filed in California, came five months after he appeared to be on the verge of a plea deal that would have avoided jail time and potentially granted him broad immunity from future prosecution stemming from his business dealings. But the agreement collapsed, and in September, he was indicted in Delaware on three charges stemming from his illegal purchase of a handgun in 2018, a period when he used drugs heavily and was prohibited from owning a firearm.The tax charges have always been the more serious element of the inquiry by the special counsel, David C. Weiss, who began investigating the president’s son five years ago as the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Delaware. Mr. Weiss was retained when President Biden took office in 2021.Mr. Biden “engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019,” Mr. Weiss wrote.“Between 2016 and Oct. 15, 2020, the defendant spent this money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes,” he added.If convicted, he could face a maximum of 17 years in prison, Justice Department officials said.Read the Tax Indictment Against Hunter BidenThe president’s son was indicted on nine counts accusing him of evading federal taxes on millions of dollars he has made in his work with foreign companies.Read Document 56 pagesThe charges, while serious, were far less explosive than ones pushed by Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans, who have been angry with the department for failing to find wider criminal wrongdoing by the president’s son and family.But the failure of Mr. Biden’s lawyers to reach a new settlement after talks with Mr. Weiss fell apart has now subjected Mr. Biden to the perils of two criminal proceedings in two jurisdictions, with unpredictable outcomes.Many of the facts laid out in Thursday’s indictment were already widely known, and the litany of Mr. Biden’s actions tracks closely with a narrative he drafted with prosecutors in the plea deal that collapsed over the summer under the withering scrutiny of a federal judge in Delaware.Prosecutors said that he “subverted the payroll and tax withholding process of his own company,” Owasco PC, by withdrawing millions from the coffers that he used to subsidize “an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills.” They also accused him of taking false business deductions.Mr. Weiss called out Mr. Biden for failing to pay child support and his reliance on associates, including the Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, to pay his way. Prosecutors included a chart that tracked the cash he siphoned from Owasco’s coffers — $1.6 million in A.T.M. withdrawals, $683,212 for “payments — various women,” nearly $400,000 for clothing and accessories, and around $750,000 for restaurants, health and beauty products, groceries, and other retail purchases.Throughout the document, Mr. Weiss presented an unflattering split-screen of Mr. Biden, scooping up millions in income and gifts from friends while stubbornly refusing to pay his taxes. That pattern even persisted into 2020, after he had borrowed money to pay off his tax liabilities from the previous few years, prosecutors wrote.“Defendant spent $17,500 each month, totaling approximately $200,000 from January through Oct. 15, 2020, on a lavish house on a canal in Venice Beach, Calif.,” they wrote, adding that “the I.R.S. stood as the last creditor to be paid.”In a statement, Abbe Lowell, Mr. Biden’s lawyer, said Mr. Weiss had “bowed to Republican pressure” and accused him of reneging on their previous agreement. He said the special counsel had not responded to his request for a meeting a few days ago to discuss the details of the case.“If Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought,” he said.The indictment includes a more detailed description of Mr. Biden’s activities and tangled business deals than the government had previously made public. Taken in its totality, the filing paints a damning portrait of personal irresponsibility by a man who leveraged his last name to finance his vices while willfully ignoring his tax liabilities.The Hunter Biden case sits at the crowded intersection of America’s colliding political and legal systems. There is now a very real prospect that President Biden’s son will be defending himself in two federal criminal trials during a presidential election year — as former President Donald J. Trump, his father’s likely opponent, confronts the possibility of two federal criminal trials in his classified documents and election interference cases.The additional charges come on the cusp of a vote by the Republican-led House to formalize its impeachment inquiry into President Biden, which is largely based on unsubstantiated allegations that he benefited from his son’s lucrative consulting work for companies in Ukraine and China.Republican leaders in the House released draft text of a procedural impeachment resolution against President Biden on Thursday, just hours before word of the new charges started to percolate through official Washington. It is not clear what effect the indictment will have on their inquiry.The indictment contains no reference to President Biden. But prosecutors pointed out that Hunter Biden’s compensation from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, dropped from $1 million a year in 2016, when his father was still in office, to $500,000 in March 2017, two months after he left office.The decision to indict the president’s troubled son was an extraordinary step for Mr. Weiss, who was named a special counsel in August by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.The Justice Department has been investigating Mr. Biden since at least 2018. Despite examining an array of matters — including Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, ties to oligarchs and business deals in China — the investigation ultimately narrowed to questions about his taxes, like his failure to file his 2017 and 2018 returns on time, and the gun purchase.The special counsel, David C. Weiss, has been investigating an array of issues surrounding Hunter Biden.Will Oliver/EPA, via ShutterstockThe investigation appeared to have come to a conclusion in June when Mr. Weiss and Mr. Biden’s lawyers announced that Mr. Biden would plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges.As part of the deal, prosecutors charged Mr. Biden with lying about whether he was using drugs but, under a so-called pretrial diversion agreement, agreed not to prosecute Mr. Biden on that. In return, Mr. Biden agreed to admit that he had used drugs at the time of the purchase and the deal remained contingent on him remaining drug free for the next two years.But the deal abruptly imploded.At a hearing in July, Judge Maryellen Noreika of the Federal District Court in Wilmington, Del., sharply questioned elements of the deal, telling the two sides repeatedly that she had no intention of being “a rubber stamp.”One objection centered on a provision that would have offered Mr. Biden broad insulation against further prosecution on matters under scrutiny during the federal inquiry. Mr. Weiss’s prosecutors and Mr. Biden’s lawyer at the time, Christopher J. Clark, disagreed on whether that shielded him from being prosecuted in connection with his foreign business dealings.The other objection had to do with the diversion program on the gun charge, under which the judge would play a role in determining whether Mr. Biden was meeting the terms of the deal.Judge Noreika said she was not trying to sink the agreement, but to strengthen it by ironing out ambiguities and inconsistencies. But by the end, the sides had splintered, prosecutors filed paperwork indicating they would proceed with a prosecution and the embattled Mr. Weiss requested to be named special counsel, which requires him to file a report at the conclusion of the investigation.Since taking control of the House in January, top Republicans have used their new investigative power to push the narrative that the president has been complicit in an effort engineered by Hunter Biden to enrich his family by profiting from their positions of power, especially through business and investment transactions abroad.The investigation has become a central focus of House Republicans, and of Mr. Trump, who has seized upon it as a counter to his own legal woes. Earlier this year, two former I.R.S. agents who worked on the investigation testified before a House committee that they had been discouraged from fully investigating interactions of Hunter Biden and his father, and that Mr. Weiss had complained that he did not have the authority to expand the investigation to other jurisdictions.Mr. Weiss denied those claims.On Thursday, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the House oversight committee, credited the “two brave I.R.S. whistle-blowers” for forcing Mr. Weiss to abandon plea negotiations and file charges.“The Department of Justice got caught in its attempt to give Hunter Biden an unprecedented sweetheart plea deal,” Mr. Comer said in a statement, adding that the men should be applauded “for their courage to expose the truth.”Luke Broadwater More