President Joe Biden's son Hunter charged with federal tax and weapons offences

The US Justice Department has charged President Joe Biden’s son Hunter with federal tax and weapons offences.

Hunter has been charged with illegally possessing a weapon as a drug user and failing to pay federal income tax.

He has agreed to plea guilty to misdemeanor tax offences and is expected to reach an agreement with prosecutors on the felony charge of illegally possessing a firearm as a drug user.

That is according to an agreement he came to with the US Justice Department, as written in a letter filed in US District Court in Delaware, which was made public on Tuesday.

The gun charge states he had a handgun, a Colt Cobra 38 special - despite knowing he was a drug user - for 11 days in October 2018.

The crime has a maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison, but the Justice Department says Hunter has reached a pretrial agreement on that charge.

The deal ends a long-running Justice Department investigation into Biden’s second son, who has acknowledged struggling with drug addiction following the death of his brother Beau in 2015.

It also means Hunter will not face a trial.

The president and first lady Jill Biden said they “love their son and support him as he continues to rebuild his life,” in a statement put out by The White House counsel’s office.

Christopher Clark, his lawyer, said he understood the five-year investigation had been resolved.

Mr Clark said: “I know Hunter believes it is important to take responsibility for these mistakes he made during a period of turmoil and addiction in his life.

“He looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward.”

This comes as the president's opposition party - congressional Republicans - continue to investigate Hunter's business dealings, including examining foreign payments and other aspects of his finances.

Joe Biden has also faced questions about his son’s business dealings and drug addiction.

It also follows Donald Trump's history-making federal court appearance where he was charged with 37 counts of illegally hoarding classified documents and preventing efforts to get them back.

Who is Hunter Biden and why is he under investigation?

Hunter Biden is the president's only living son.

His mother, Neilia, and baby sister died in a car crash in 1972.

In 2015, his brother Beau Biden died of brain cancer aged 46.

Though he does not work for The White House, Hunter Biden has been the subject of a long-term scruitny into his business dealings by the congressional Republicans.

They claim his work on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2014 influenced the US government's foreign policy while his father worked as vice president for Barrack Obama.

Senate Republicans said, in a 2020 report, that this may have posed a conflict of interest but did not provide evidence that any policies were directly affected by Hunter Biden’s work.   

They also sought to make his business dealings in Ukraine a prominent issue during the 2020 presidential election.

In October that year, the New York Post reported a copy of a hard drive of a laptop that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop had been sent to them by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

No evidence has emerged since of any Russian connections to the laptop or the emails, and several news organisations have said they have substantiated many of the emails on the device.

Hunter Biden later asked the Justice Department in a letter from his lawyer to investigate Trump allies who accessed and disseminated personal data from the laptop.

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