Special Prosecutor David Weiss says Hunter Biden's tax crimes cannot be dismissed – despite his father's presidential pardon.
Hunter's lawyers filed papers asking a California judge to dismiss the case as soon as Joe Biden pardoned him on Sunday.
But in a response on Monday, Weiss, the senior Justice Department official who ran the prosecutions against the felon First Son, argued that it's not that simple.
In their filing, Weiss and his prosecutors Leo Wise and Derek Hines slammed Hunter's lawyers for trying to 'blot out guilt' and erase the shocking deeds he admitted to in court.
They said that the court should instead close the case with a note acknowledging Hunter's presidential pardon, but leaving his guilty plea on the record, along with the official finding that prosecutors' charges of debauchery, deliberate tax-dodging and political perversion were true.
The DoJ officials accused Hunter's hotshot Washington DC attorney Abbe Lowell of 'misrepresent[ing] the law' adding that 'Nothing requires the dismissal of the indictment in this case.'
The Special Prosecutor said that instead of dismissing the case, the usual practice is that 'once an Executive Grant of Clemency has been filed on the docket, the docket is marked closed, the disposition entry is updated to reflect the executive grant of clemency, and no further action is taken by the Court.'
That way, Hunter's confession to the charges laid out in a 56-page indictment filed December last year would remain on the record.