Hunter Biden, spotted by Fox News cameras this week leaving through the back door of a “wellness center” at South Lake Tahoe, California, has been quietly vacationing in the exclusive resort area with the first family, but he may soon be facing felony charges elsewhere in the Golden State.

A newly minted special counsel, David Weiss, is expected any day to refile criminal charges against Mr. Biden fils in California or at the District of Columbia after the first son’s plea deal famously collapsed a month ago. The charges to which he was planning to confess — tax evasion and the illegal purchase of a firearm — can carry hefty criminal penalties. 

In a July 26 plea hearing at Delaware, which took a disastrous turn for Mr. Biden, the judge presiding over the case, Maryellen Noreika, took issue with several provisions, most notably the question of whether Mr. Biden would be immune from future prosecutions. The surprise death of the agreement led Mr. Weiss, who also serves as Delaware’s United States attorney, to ask for a dismissal of the charges leveled against Mr. Biden, which would allow the Department of Justice to prosecute the first son in open court in the jurisdictions where the tax offenses took place. 

Mr. Weiss, who, according to two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers sought to bring charges against Mr. Biden at both the District of Columbia and the Central District of California, said in a legal brief requesting the dismissal of charges that “the Government now believes that the case will not resolve short of a trial.”

Mr. Weiss requested and was granted special counsel status in part so he could pursue the charges outside Delaware. Not only is he expected to refile the tax and weapons charges in California or at the District of Columbia, but he’s also expected to investigate Mr. Biden for violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act during his work for Ukrainian and Chinese business interests.

Mr. Biden has been accused by the United States attorney’s office of twice engaging in “willful” tax evasion and illegally purchasing a firearm while in active addiction to crack cocaine. In a memoir, Mr. Biden admitted that he had lied about his drug use in order to buy a Colt .38 in October 2018. 

According to Politico, the firearm came to the attention of law enforcement a few days later after his girlfriend at the time, his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, found the weapon in his pickup truck and threw it away in a garbage can behind a supermarket at Wilmington, Delaware.

The question for Mr. Weiss is whether he will pursue another plea agreement with Mr. Biden over the tax and firearms charges they had previously attempted to resolve or if, as Mr. Weiss wrote in the court filing, the matters will go to trial. Shortly after the agreement fell apart, Mr. Biden’s lawyers contended that the plea deal was “valid and binding” because it had been signed by prosecutors, though the presiding judge rejected that assertion. 

Republicans voiced their disdain for Mr. Weiss shortly after his appointment as special counsel, saying a man who would negotiate such an agreement is incapable of prosecuting Mr. Biden to the fullest extent of the law. 

“If Weiss negotiated the sweetheart deal that couldn’t get approved, how can he be trusted as a Special Counsel?” Speaker McCarthy tweeted shortly after the announcement that Mr. Weiss had been granted special counsel status. 

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Congressman James Comer, also said Mr. Weiss cannot be trusted. “Let’s be clear what today’s move is really about,” Mr. Comer said in a statement. “The Biden Justice Department is trying to stonewall congressional oversight as we have presented evidence to the American people.”

Mr. Trump, who appointed Mr. Weiss to be his U.S. attorney, pointed out this week on Truth Social that Mr. Weiss was a “blue slip” appointment, recommended for this job by Delaware’s two Democratic senators in President Biden’s home state and rubber-stamped by the president.

A former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who once served as the United States attorney for New Jersey, said during the Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday night that Mr. Biden was receiving preferential treatment because of his last name. 

“In a Christie administration, he would go to jail for 10 years,” the former governor said of the first son’s firearms violation. Under federal law, the maximum sentence for illegally purchasing a firearm while addicted to a controlled substance is 10 years, though the plea agreement Mr. Weiss negotiated would have only required the first son to enter a “pretrial diversion program” that would require him to stay sober, relinquish his right to own firearms, and take regularly scheduled drug tests. 

It may be considered ironic that the law that Mr. Biden has admitted to violating — lying on a form 4473 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms — was written by his father. The older Mr. Biden, while a member of the Senate in the early 1990s, wrote the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which criminalized lying on the form 4473. 

Mr. Biden is also likely to face charges of tax evasion at his former home, the District of Columbia, or at his current residence, the Central District of California. According to two IRS whistleblowers who claimed in sworn testimony that Mr. Biden was granted preferential treatment during the criminal investigation, the first son avoided more than $100,000 in federal income taxes by claiming vacations, tuition payments, and a rental property in France, where he learned to cook crack cocaine, as business expenses. The whistleblowers also say he took illegal tax deductions on payments to female escorts.

Under the terms of his plea agreement, the younger Mr. Biden was set to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay more than $100,000 in taxes from more than $1.5 million in income in both 2017 and 2018. He was also planning to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of “willful” tax avoidance for the 2014 calendar year. The maximum penalty for each of the charges would be a year in prison, though it is likely the sentences would be served concurrently should Mr. Biden be charged and found guilty. 

The president himself could be dragged into his son’s legal troubles should federal prosecutors move forward with charges. On August 19, Politico reported that Mr. Biden’s attorney who negotiated the plea agreement, Christopher Clark, warned  Mr. Weiss in 2022 that should he bring charges against the first son, “President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial.”

“This of all cases justifies neither the spectacle of a sitting President testifying at a criminal trial nor the potential for a resulting Constitutional crisis,” Mr. Clark wrote.