- Judge Holly Meyer ripped into Hunter Biden and his legal team for 'sealing and redacting' his financial information
- She suggested lawyers for Lunden Roberts subpoena a downtown Manhattan art gallery to find out how much he made from selling his art
- The hearing marks the first time Roberts, 32, and Biden, 53, came face to face since she gave birth to his daughter, Navy Joan, now four
The judge presiding over Hunter Biden's child support trial on Monday ripped into the First Son for 'sealing and redacting' his financial information.
'The ability to redact is somewhat being abused,' Judge Holly Meyer fumed. ‘I’m seeing a lot of things filed, especially by Mr. Biden’s counsel, sealing things, redacting things, that are not confidential.'
She suggested that lawyers for the First Son's baby mama should subpoena a downtown Manhattan art gallery to find out exactly how much he has made from selling his art.
And the judge ordered the First Son to produce more financial documents to back his claim that he should be allowed to reduce the amount he gives Lunden Roberts each month.
Roberts, 32, and Biden, 53, came face to face for the first time since she gave birth to his daughter, Navy Joan, now four.
Hunter Biden, 53, is pictured arriving at a Batesville, Arkansas courthouse on Monday
The hearing marks the first time Biden came face to face with Lunden Roberts (pictured on Monday) since she gave birth to his daughter, Navy Joan, now four
Though Biden occasionally looked across at her in the courtroom in Batesville, Arkansas, Roberts, who was supported in court by her parents Rob and Kimberly and her sister Randi Jo Bolin, avoided eye contact.
Neither party was called to testify as their legal teams sparred over disclosure requests before agreeing to take depositions in June ahead of a July trial.
Wearing a dark suit and tie, Biden listened intently but said nothing as Roberts’s attorney Clint Lancaster reeled off a list of items that he claimed Hunter’s team had not answered or explained properly in their discovery responses.
He said these included a line in Hunter’s tax returns referencing a $9 million investment in a Chinese entity which came with no further explanation.
‘He’s wrong, that’s not what it states,’ Biden’s hotshot DC lawyer Abbe Lowell shot back. The judge said the exchange was a perfect illustration of why Hunter had to be more forthcoming.
Lancaster then asked Hunter’s team why he had not listed any hotel stays over a five-year period aside from a single occasion when he slept ‘on a cot in his dad’s room’. His lawyers insisted that was accurate.
Lancaster said he was also missing the names of Hunter’s art buyers and the valuations of his pricey paintings which are on display at the upscale George Berges Gallery in Manhattan.
Attorneys for the First Son have tried to explain that he does not know the identities of his art buyers as part of a purported arrangement to ensure they are unable to 'influence' his father's administration.
But the judge said she found it ‘incredible’ his lawyers couldn’t give an idea of the prices. She then told Lancaster he could subpoena the gallery to find out more.
A judge on Monday suggested Robert's attorney, Clint Lancaster, subpoena a downtown Manhattan art gallery to find out exactly how much Biden has made from selling his art
Lancaster is pictured here talking to the press about the hearing on Monday
Hunter’s responses also failed to specify precisely how much money he had been handed by his so-called ‘sugar brother’ pal Kevin Morris and what it was for.
Morris, a prominent Hollywood attorney who reportedly loaned Hunter $2.8 million to pay off a 2021 tax bill, was simply a ‘concerned friend’, Lowell replied.
Judge Meyer ordered Hunter to produce more information, however, saying: ‘That’s a pretty lame answer.’
When it was Hunter’s turn to complain about Roberts, his team brought up Garrett Ziegler – a former Trump administration staffer and longtime Hunter nemesis – who is an expert witness for Roberts and was sat in court.
Lowell said he had not been sent so much as a resume or report from his counterparts about Ziegler’s looming evidence.
Lancaster responded by pulling out a copy of a 644-page analysis Ziegler prepared on the contents of Hunter’s notorious abandoned laptop for his non-profit Marco Polo.
He then handed the massive stack of papers – entitled ‘Report – Biden’s laptop’ – to an incredulous Langdon, saying: ‘That’s all I have.’
Roberts agreed to hand over paperwork covering her car lease, her house and her work for her father’s gun business. Both parties agreed to turn over five years of phone records covering any messages relating to Navy Joan.
Earlier in the hearing, Lowell suggested it was time the world knew how much his client was shelling out for the child he has never met.
‘Mr. Biden is paying the plaintiff $20,000 a month,’ Lowell told the two-hour hearing. He later said the total figure handed over was $750,000.
Hunter hopped out of a silver SUV and headed inside at 8.45am, stopping briefly to shake someone's hand in the entrance way
Hunter’s lawyers kicked off the hearing on Monday by complaining about recent DailyMail.com articles scrutinizing the First Son’s lavish lifestyle, including references to him driving a Porsche and flying on Air Force One.
‘The Porsche was repo’d’, protested Brent Langdon, another of Biden’s legal team. ‘By the way, my client has been on Air Force One one time, and that was recent.’
Hunter’s lawyers read out the headline from an exclusive April 28 DailyMail.com article in which we reported that Roberts had accused him of posing as a ‘destitute’ artist to get his child support payments slashed.
Despite the information being quoted from readily available court documents, Lowell griped: ‘Headlines like this are so misinformed.’
Langdon went further by accusing his counterparts of feeding documents, a suggestion Roberts’ attorney Clinton Lancaster robustly denied.
‘There are matters that are redacted that are getting out to the Daily [Mail],’ said Langdon.
Circuit Judge Holly Meyer clapped back, suggesting Langdon had offered no proof that our revelations didn’t come from public documents and legitimate sources.
‘I can’t gag the whole world,’ she said. ‘I can’t control the salacious stuff that’s written in the newspapers.’
Roberts argues that Hunter Biden, the father of her four-year-old daughter Navy, has plenty of money to make his child support payments
Hunter fathered a son he named Beau after his late brother with his new wife Melissa Cohen just 17 months after Navy was born
The long-running paternity suit had seemed to have been resolved in 2019 when a DNA test proved Hunter had fathered Navy Joan and he agreed to a reported $2.5 million settlement.
But the recovering drug addict abruptly reopened the case last September by claiming he had suffered ‘a substantial material change’ in his income and couldn’t afford the payments.
Roberts refused to buckle and raised the stakes by petitioning the court to officially rename her daughter Navy Joan Biden to ‘benefit from carrying the Biden Family name,’ a move Hunter dismissed as ‘political warfare.’
She also served Hunter with a sprawling discovery request covering everything from his business dealings in Ukraine and China to the names of the mystery art lovers who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his beginner paintings.
After Hunter blew through multiple deadlines to turn over his documents, Judge Meyer ordered him to appear in person for today's hearing.
Judge Meyer warned them that she would not tolerate any further delays as she set a discovery deadline of May 12, ordered depositions to take place from June 13 to 16 and resisted a request to push back the trial, which is slated for July 24.
Hunter, his thinning hair slicked back and graying at the temples, chatted amicably with Lancaster as he left court, flanked by Secret Service agents.
He ignored a DailyMail.com request for comment before he was whisked out of the building via a back entrance and into his awaiting SUV, part of a six-car motorcade.
An elderly lady chanted ‘go Trump’ as the Biden scion walked past in the corridor but the dozens of onlookers in the public gallery took heed of the judge’s warning not to shout anything or record on their phones.
Roberts, who wore a smart blue jacket, a black suit, black boots and dark sunglasses, said nothing as she left but Lancaster spoke briefly to reporters, saying: ‘I think it’s embarrassing the President doesn’t acknowledge his granddaughter who looks like his son.
He said of Navy Joan: ‘She’s wonderful, she’s surrounded by people who love her.’
The hearing took place amid tight security, with all corners of the courthouse flanked by deputies and police bomb-sniffing dogs seen sweeping for threats.
Roberts lit the touch paper last week by accusing Hunter of hiding assets and posing as a ‘destitute’ artist in her latest court filing.
The explosive document formed the basis of the DailyMail.com article that his lawyers would later complain about.
She wanted to know how Hunter can plead poverty while deploying a stable of super lawyers including Lowell – who is said to charge up to $855 per hour – across his various lawsuits and congressional probes.
The feisty single mom, who studied crime scene investigation at George Washington University, had previously even called for Hunter to be slung in the county jail and left there until he coughed up his records.
Lancaster argues that slashing the childcare payments would be ‘inappropriate and unjust’ and wants Hunter – who spent last week at Democrat donor’s Joe Kiani $50 California vineyard – to pay more if he's caught concealing his true wealth.
In his own filings, Hunter has opposed Navy Joan becoming a Biden, insisting he wants a ‘peaceful existence’ for her, free of the political scrutiny associated with his family dynasty.
Hunter has never seen Navy Joan and could not pick her out of a photo lineup, according to court filings
The angelic, blonde-haired girl was born in August 2018 but remained a secret until Roberts sued Hunter for child support in her native Arkansas.
She is the fourth of Hunter’s five children but neither he, nor his parents Joe and Jill Biden, have ever met the child or publicly acknowledged her existence.
Hunter claimed during the original 10-month paternity case that he was ‘unemployed and had no monthly income’ despite living in a $12,000-per-month Hollywood rental and driving a Porsche.
But when a judge ordered him to produce financial records he repeatedly failed to do so and instead settled out of court, the two sides announcing a ‘global, final settlement of all issues'.
It was initially reported that Hunter met Roberts while she worked as a stripper at a DC club which Hunter frequented.
But texts retrieved from his abandoned laptop proved that she was in fact on the payroll at Rosemont Seneca, Hunter’s Washington, D.C. investment firm.
She and Hunter conceived Navy Joan around December 2017 while he was still in a relationship with his late brother Beau's widow, Hallie.
And she gets none of the perks, nor the round-the-clock Secret Service protection, enjoyed by the rest of the Biden brood, including her younger half-brother that Hunter named for Beau.
Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12035297/Hunter-Biden-ripped-Arkansas-judge-sealing-redacting-financial-info.html
