A nine-count indictment filed Thursday against Hunter Biden laid out years of the first son’s extravagant spending and sprawling foreign business dealings.

But it also raised questions about why the charges did not arrive until nearly a decade after the alleged criminal activity began.

Special counsel David Weiss filed the charges just four months after requesting the authority to bring the case outside his home district in Delaware, where he had investigated Hunter Biden for five years as a U.S. attorney.

Although President Joe Biden was not named as a participant in the schemes described in the indictment, he has spoken to or met with several of the business partners who were.

Here are nine takeaways from the indictment.

Hunter’s PR strategy at odds with tax defense

Hunter Biden and his allies have embarked on an extensive public relations campaign in recent months to highlight the first son’s struggles with substance abuse before he became sober in 2019. Joe Biden’s defenders have said Hunter Biden’s addictions were crippling and have suggested attacking him for decisions he made during his struggles should be off-limits.

But defending himself against the specific charges brought by Weiss regarding the 2018 tax return will require Hunter Biden to argue that he was, in fact, capable of conducting business at the time.

That’s because Weiss charged Hunter Biden with claiming $388,810 in business travel expenses on his 2018 tax return “despite having done little to no business in that year.”

Hunter Biden’s story of powerlessness in the face of addiction is at odds with a defense that would require him to argue the expenses he claimed were legitimate because he was still conducting business in 2018.

And as prosecutors noted in the indictment, Hunter Biden admitted in his 2021 memoir that he spent most of 2018 partying in various hotel rooms, some of which he named in the book. Investigators were able to cross-reference the hotels Hunter Biden wrote that he rented for drug-fueled parties with his friends against the expenses on his tax returns, and they found Hunter Biden attempted to deduct some of those hotel stays as business expenses.

For example, Hunter Biden spent nearly $45,000 on stays at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in April and May of 2018 alone and claimed it as a business expense; in his book, Hunter Biden wrote in detail about holing up in that hotel during those specific months and smoking crack around the clock with his friends.

Taxes in the trunk

One of Hunter Biden’s four unfiled tax returns sat in the trunk of his car for months, prosecutors claimed, as the first son continued to delay filing his taxes or paying his IRS debts.

“On March 9, 2018, the Defendant’s ex-wife texted him that she had discovered their unfiled 2016 tax returns in the trunk of his car,” prosecutors said in the indictment. “The Defendant responded telling her, ‘The taxes are filed those were copies with [Personal Assistant 1]’s notes.’ The tax returns had not been filed.”

Months earlier, Hunter Biden’s ex-wife had signed the returns and sent them to him with the expectation that he would file the documents.

He did not file his individual tax return for 2016 until 2020, according to the indictment.

The discovery of the unfiled tax returns in the trunk, as well as the lie Hunter Biden told his wife about the documents, demonstrated that Hunter Biden carelessly ignored his IRS obligations at the time.

Pornography purchases

To underscore how frivolously Hunter Biden spent money he deducted as business expenditures, Weiss highlighted the eye-popping amounts the first son spent on pornography.

For example, prosecutors say Hunter Biden lied to his accountants about how he spent a $119,000 transfer out of his business account, which he described to them as a business line of credit.

Hunter Biden then used that money to make “payments to an online pornography website, which in total accounted for one fifth of all of the business line of credit expenditures,” the indictment said.

In total, Hunter Biden spent $188,960 on “adult entertainment” over four years, according to prosecutors.

While he did not deduct that entire sum from his taxes, Weiss cited the figure to make the case that Hunter Biden had plenty of money to settle his tax debts but that he chose to spend it elsewhere.

Burisma slashed Hunter’s pay under Trump

When Burisma hired Hunter Biden to serve on its board in 2014, the Ukrainian company offered him a roughly $1 million salary, the indictment said. His father was vice president at the time.

But in March 2017, Burisma cut Hunter Biden’s salary in half, offering him only $500,000 per year for the remainder of his time on the board.

The pay cut coincided with Joe Biden leaving office, and it lends further support to the argument from critics that Hunter Biden profited solely off his father’s influence.

Sober lies

Hunter Biden dates his sobriety to spring 2019, when he met and married his second wife, Melissa Cohen, in California.

But some of the most serious allegations against him involve conduct from early 2020, when he was no longer battling addiction.

Prosecutors said Hunter Biden met extensively with his California-based team of accountants — both of whom, according to documents released by the House Ways and Means Committee, cooperated with investigators — to walk them through which expenses he intended to claim as business-related and which were personal.

The accountants had told the FBI and IRS investigators that getting documents and straight answers from Hunter Biden about his financial situation was difficult, and so to insulate themselves from legal trouble, they took the unusual step of asking Hunter Biden to sign a letter assuming sole responsibility for the truthfulness of his tax return.

Hunter Biden went through his papers in his accountants’ office in February 2020 and personally circled which expenses he wanted to deduct from his taxes as business-related; many of his claims to the accountants were lies.

For example, prosecutors said Hunter Biden deducted payments to prostitutes as “office” expenses, tuition for his daughter’s law school as “legal professional” consulting fees, and a $10,000 sex club membership as a “consulting” fee when preparing his 2018 tax return.

And while the expenses themselves occurred at a time when he was using drugs, his lies about them to accountants, and ultimately to the IRS, occurred when he was sober.

Even after lowering the amount he owed to the IRS by falsifying deductions, Hunter Biden still refused to pay his debts from earlier tax years, prosecutors said.

“From January to June of 2020, the Defendant spent approximately $187,000 on personal expenses rather than pay the $45,661 he owed” the IRS for a tax bill that dated back to 2016, according to the indictment.

During that same six-month period, according to the indictment, Kevin Morris, described in the indictment as a personal friend, gave Hunter Biden $500,000 to support his lifestyle, and the first son spent none of it on his taxes.

Family affair?

While Joe Biden was not mentioned in the indictment, his brother, James Biden, appears to be referenced anonymously.

Hunter Biden and James Biden worked with Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC starting when Joe Biden was vice president and began receiving payments from CEFC shortly after Joe Biden left office.

James Biden told investigators that he received his cut of the CEFC money through Hunter Biden, who took the payments from CEFC and divided them up between himself and his uncle.

The indictment references a “Business Associate 3” to whom Hunter Biden wired more than $1 million in 2017 and 2018.

James Biden’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings has complicated the argument that Hunter Biden acted independently of his powerful family. Coming from completely different professional and educational backgrounds, Hunter and James Biden had few shared skill sets to offer a company seeking to hire them both — except for their last name.

Statute of limitations problems

IRS whistleblowers told Congress in May that a series of bureaucratic roadblocks within the Justice Department prevented Weiss from bringing charges against Hunter Biden for the 2014 and 2015 tax years, during which Hunter Biden earned significant income from Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.

The statute of limitations on that activity expired last year.

But Weiss still included some of the evidence investigators had collected from their inquiry into the 2014 and 2015 tax years in the indictment, citing it as further support for the tax charges Weiss did bring.

“The Defendant did not report his income from Burisma” on his 2014 tax income form, prosecutors noted in the indictment. He did so in 2015, however.

Weiss described the business arrangements Hunter Biden had with “Business Associate 5,” likely former business partner Devon Archer, to collect their income from Burisma. Archer also sat on the Burisma board at the time.

The mention of activity that took place in 2014 and 2015 suggests prosecutors intend to introduce evidence in court of tax crimes Weiss was not able to allege formally. The IRS whistleblowers said the 2014 and 2015 tax year charges needed to be brought in Washington, D.C., but the U.S. attorney there, who was appointed by Joe Biden, blocked Weiss’s ability to do so last year.

Paper trail of warnings

Weiss cited extensively from emails that showed how urgently Hunter Biden’s then-business partner, likely Eric Schwerin, warned him about the need to pay his taxes over the years.

Described as “Business Associate 4” in the indictment, Schwerin helped Hunter Biden set up accounts that would withhold taxes from his income, collected documents Hunter Biden would need to file his taxes, and nudged him about upcoming deadlines.

In some cases, Hunter Biden responded to the messages with acknowledgments that he knew his taxes were a problem — a fact Weiss used as evidence that Hunter Biden’s failure to pay his taxes was “willful.”

In addition to Schwerin, various accountants and personal assistants also left a paper trail of warnings to Hunter Biden about his taxes that, according to prosecutors, the first son seemingly ignored.

Hunter Biden also appears to have lied to his ex-wife about having paid his taxes even as he refused to pay them. In October 2018, for example, Hunter Biden texted his exwife to tell her he could not make an alimony payment to her because he had spent all his money on tuition for their children and his taxes.

At the same time, prosecutors say, Hunter Biden was ignoring emails from his accountant about the more than $800,000 in taxes he owed for 2017.

More laptop proof

Three years after Joe Biden’s allies dismissed the content from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop as a Russian disinformation effort, Weiss’s indictment offered the latest piece of evidence that the laptop is authentic.

Prosecutors quoted from emails between Hunter Biden, his assistants, and his former business partners throughout the charging documents.

Those same emails also appeared on copies of Hunter Biden’s laptop that were shared with media outlets starting in 2020.

That the Justice Department treated the emails as evidence in its case suggests the messages are real, contrary to Hunter Biden’s claims.

Schwerin helped Hunter Biden set up accounts that would withhold taxes from his income, collected documents Hunter Biden would need to file his taxes ... Biden responded to the messages with acknowledgments that he knew his taxes were a problem — a fact Weiss used as evidence that Hunter Biden’s failure to pay his taxes was “willful.”