Hunter Biden has been charged in connection with a long-running Justice Department investigation into his taxes -- the second criminal case that special counsel David Weiss has brought against President Joe Biden's son.

The charges span nine counts, including failure to file and pay taxes; evasion of assessment; and false or fraudulent tax return. CNN was first to report a new criminal case had been filed.

According to the special counsel's team, Hunter Biden "engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million" in taxes that he owed from 2016 through 2019. Though Hunter Biden did eventually pay his taxes from 2018, prosecutors allege that he included "false business deductions in order to evade assessment of taxes to reduce the substantial tax liabilities he faced."

Prosecutors also allege in the indictment that he "subverted the payroll and tax withholding process of his own company" by withdrawing millions of dollars outside of its payroll and tax withholding process.

The president's son "spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills," the indictment states.

Hunter Biden's lawyers did not immediately comment. Asked for comment, the White House referred CNN to the Justice Department and Hunter Biden's representatives.

In a news release announcing the charges Thursday, the Justice Department said Hunter Biden could face a maximum of 17 years in prison if convicted of the charges.

The case had been close to being resolved in July when a plea deal fell apart. The new tax case stems from Hunter Biden's lucrative overseas business dealings -- including his involvement with Ukrainian energy company Burisma and a Chinese private equity fund -- which are at the center of House Republicans' impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.

Now, the president will be campaigning for a second White House term and fighting a Republican impeachment bid while his son fights to avoid prison in two criminal cases.

According to court filings from the now-defunct plea deal, Hunter Biden repeatedly missed IRS deadlines to pay his federal taxes on time, and eventually owed about $2 million to the government. He paid the money back in 2021, with a loan from a friend.

Federal prosecutors have been scrutinizing Hunter Biden's finances since 2018, and Trump-appointed US attorney David Weiss was designated special counsel in August.

The probe appeared to be winding down this summer when Hunter Biden agreed to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors, and prosecutors would recommend no jail time. They also agreed that a gun charge would be dropped in two years if he stayed out of legal trouble.

But both proposed deals collapsed after scrutiny from a federal judge and disagreements over the fine print. Then Weiss indicted Hunter Biden in September on three charges related to his purchase of a gun from a shop in Delaware in 2018 at a time prosecutors say he was an illegal drug user. He has pleaded not guilty in the gun possession and false statements case.

Hunter Biden's attorneys previously accused Weiss of "bending to political pressure" from Republicans and said that his actions "present a grave threat to our system of justice."

One of the reasons Republicans have attacked Weiss is because of testimony from two IRS whistleblowers who were involved in the probe and said they witnessed political interference by the Justice Department. The whistleblowers said career IRS agents recommended felony tax charges against Hunter Biden in early 2022.

Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland have refuted the whistleblowers' claims.

Hunter Biden made millions of dollars from private equity deals, corporate consulting and legal fees in Ukraine, China, Romania and other countries. Prosecutors previously said he had the money to buy luxury items like a Porsche and was warned about his looming tax bills by accountants and associates -- but still missed the IRS deadlines.

House Republicans have zeroed in on many of these overseas deals as part of their own probes.

They've uncovered some evidence that Hunter Biden leveraged his father's position to make money. But their impeachment inquiry is largely based on their unproven claims that Joe Biden was involved in "corrupt" business deals with his son.

To date, federal prosecutors have never offered any evidence backing up GOP claims that Joe Biden was in business with his son or abused his powers to enrich his family.

This headline and story have been updated with additional developments.

Reminder that Moderna's CEO is a lab-leak conspiracy theorist

Alex Jones predicted 9-11, in detail and on camera, months before it happened. How did he do that? And why did the government decide to destroy him after he did? The full interview Thursday. pic.twitter.com/BIzM3BDtAz

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 6, 2023

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/05/09/527575055/one-third-of-new-drugs-had-safety-problems-after-fda-approval

The Biden administration has delayed its ban on menthol cigarettes after strategists warned President Biden that it could negatively impact his support among black voters.

Leaders in the black community claim that the ban would foster an underground market and cause police to target black smokers in a disproportional manner, the Washington Post reports.

Since the black community has drastically dwindled its support for Biden over the past few years, the president's administration isn't taking any chances despite updated health guidance from the FDA and CDC.

According to data from the CDC, 81 percent of black smokers opt for menthol cigarettes.

Democrat civil rights leader Al Sharpton and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are among the critics of the ban. Sharpton asserts that it would form an underground market which would result in police disproportionately targeting black people. He said that the ban could create "another Eric Garner situation," referring to a black man who died in police custody in 2014 during a dispute about selling illegal smokes, according to the New York Post.

However, the outlet reports that it was later revealed that Al Sharpton's organization, National Action Network, has received major donations from R.J. Reynolds which owns the top-selling menthol cigarette brand in the nation, Newport.

In 2022, the FDA unveiled new regulations on menthol cigarettes, aiming to combat illness and fatalities caused by a product that was once targeted to African-American smokers.

The Biden administration was set to officially ban the product in August but pushed the date back to January 2024. The date has been delayed once again and is now set for March 2024, according to the Daily Mail.

Scientific research has led the CDC to issue advisories stating that "menthol in cigarettes increases the likelihood that youth and young adults will try smoking and that those who begin smoking will continue to smoke regularly."

"Menthol makes cigarettes more appealing and easier to smoke," according to the CDC. "In addition, menthol enhances the addictive effects of nicotine in the brain. The amount of nicotine, the addictive drug in tobacco products, in menthol cigarettes has increased in recent years."

According to the data cited, an estimated 10.1 million individuals began consuming menthol cigarettes between 1980 and 2018, which led to the premature deaths of 378,000 individuals. In total, the organization calculated three million years of "potential life lost" throughout the time period.

ATLANTA (AP) --- An effort to access voting system software in several states and provide it to allies of former President Donald Trump as they sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election has raised "serious threats" ahead of next year's presidential contest, according to a group of experts who urged federal agencies to investigate.

The letter sent by nearly two dozen computer scientists, election security experts and voter advocacy organizations asks for a federal probe and a risk assessment of voting machines used throughout the country, saying the software breaches have "urgent implications for the 2024 election and beyond." The breaches affected voting equipment made by two companies that together count over 70% of the votes cast across the country, according to the letter.

"The multistate effort to unlawfully obtain copies of voting system software poses serious threats to election security and national security and constitutes a potential criminal conspiracy of enormous consequences," the group wrote in a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, special counsel Jack Smith, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. "We must protect our most sacred tenet of democracy --- the security of our vote."

The letter, sent to the agencies late Monday, was organized by the left-leaning group Free Speech for People, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on election and campaign finance reforms. The group also has filed challenges in a handful of states seeking to ban Trump from the ballot in 2024 under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The FBI, Justice Department and Smith's office declined comment. The cybersecurity agency did not immediately respond.

Trump's loss in the 2020 election helped fuel unfounded conspiracy theories around voting machines that in turn led to threats against election workers, a push in many conservative counties to hand-count ballots and defamation lawsuits by companies that make the equipment. Authorities in three states --- Colorado, Georgia and Michigan --- have charged people in connection with breaches at local election offices, but there has been no public indication of a federal probe.

The letter sent this week outlines what is known publicly about the efforts to access those voting systems, which began in the weeks after the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden. It cites a Dec. 18, 2020, meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump allies, including lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, discussed a desire to access voting machines in presidential swing states Trump lost, according to congressional testimony. It also details subsequent efforts to secure that access.

Powell, Giuliani and Trump were among 19 people charged this summer in Fulton County, Georgia, where state prosecutors have alleged they were part of a conspiracy to overturn Trump's loss in the state. That included the unauthorized breach of voting systems in rural Coffee County, Georgia.

Powell has since pleaded guilty to reduced charges and has agreed to testify against her co-defendants. Prosecutors alleged she had conspired with others to access election equipment without authorization in the county and hired a computer forensics firm to copy software and data from voting machines and computers.

The letter to federal officials cites various documents and news reports to highlight potential connections between Powell and three people charged in a similar effort in Michigan, where state prosecutors allege there was unauthorized access to ballot tabulators in three counties. Powell has not been charged in the Michigan case.

In addition to Georgia and Michigan, the letter mentions voting system breaches or attempts to access voting-related systems in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada and Colorado as well as various individuals involved in the efforts. It stresses that possession of voting system software could enable people with ill intent to practice how to meddle in the 2024 election, allowing them to identify vulnerabilities and test potential attacks.

"And they could use their knowledge of the software to fabricate evidence of stolen votes, either for disinformation or to challenge election results," the letter said.

In Colorado, former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters has pleaded not guilty to state charges alleging she was part of a "deceptive scheme" to provide unauthorized access to the county's voting systems during a May 2021 breach that eventually resulted in a copy of the voting system hard drive being posted online.

Peters, whose trial is scheduled for next year, has said she had the authority to investigate concerns that the voting equipment had been manipulated. She has appeared at several events with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has promoted election conspiracy theories.

Federal authorities have been involved in the Colorado case, but the extent of any investigation is unknown. In September 2022, Lindell said he received a subpoena from a federal grand jury investigating the breach in Colorado and was ordered to hand over his cellphone to FBI agents.

In the Michigan case, a special prosecutor said local clerks who turned over the ballot tabulators and others who analyzed the equipment "were deceived by some of the charged defendants." They have not been charged.

Among the 22 people who signed the letter to the federal agencies was Douglas W. Jones, a computer scientist who said the effects of the various breaches were not limited to the local election offices where they occurred because the voting system software involved is used by many offices across the country. The letter says those involved accessed equipment made by two of the leading manufacturers, Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software.

"In 2024, no matter which way the election goes, election deniers on one side or the other could easily grasp on the breaches following the 2020 election and suggest that those breaches allowed the 2024 results to be cooked," he said.

Election technology expert Kevin Skoglund, who also signed the letter, said a federal probe was necessary because many of those involved have not been investigated or been asked to give up their copies of the election software.

"Every software copy that is reclaimed reduces the risks of further distribution, disinformation and harm to the security of future elections," Skoglund said. "There should be consequences for widely sharing parts of our national critical infrastructure or others will be encouraged to repeat these schemes."

Perhaps you should take a good look in the mirror first before talking trash about the white race. Not to mention that black people in general are making everything about race. Stop victimising yourselves and actually get stuff by EARNING it like every other human being. It's nobody's fault but yourselves for being the way you are, for the “values” that you embrace, stop being brainwashed that it's the white people's fault for everything. Fix yourselves instead of throwing blame on others for your own shortcomings. You're the ones who are being manipulated the most for a reason. Getting triggered about culture appropriation but where are all of you when the woke culture is blackwashing stories that are symbols of the white culture without a shred of shame, respect, spine or morals and then cry when the same people who are insulted by this are taking action by not supporting those companies? The audacity.

!nonchuds RIGHTOID SEETHE IN BAITPOST ARTICLE LOL