An Arkansas judge has demanded Hunter Biden return to her courtroom on July 10 in the ongoing child support payment dispute with his former mistress, with whom he fathered a child in 2018. The judge says Mr. Biden could face up to a year in jail if he does not comply. 

An Independence County circuit judge, Holly Meyer, issued an order requiring Mr. Biden to turn over “relevant financial information” related to his child support payments and changes to his income. Mr. Biden — who currently pays his former mistress, Lunden Roberts, $20,000 a month — says there has been a “substantial material change” in his income and he can no longer pay at that rate. 

Ms. Roberts alleges that Mr. Biden was not truthful or forthcoming when asked about his financial situation back in May. Ms. Roberts is also suing to have her child’s surname changed to Biden. 

Judge Meyer wrote in her order that Mr. Biden will face a number of consequences should he fail to appear or not turn over financial information, including six months in prison for civil contempt, six months in prison for criminal contempt, a $20,000 fine payable to Ms. Roberts, and the inability to be heard by the court should he be found in contempt. 

Ms. Roberts, a former stripper whom Mr. Biden met in 2018, successfully forced Mr. Biden in 2020 to take a paternity test after a series of court hearings. Mr. Biden did not contest the results of the test, which showed the child was his. He has since said he was constantly drunk and high at the time the child was conceived and cannot remember the sexual encounter. Mr. Biden is now in recovery after years of active addiction to alcohol and drugs, including crack cocaine. He has remarried, to a South African filmmaker, Melissa Cohen, with whom he has a toddler son he named Beau after his late brother.

Judge Meyer’s latest order follows a May 1 hearing in Arkansas that Mr. Biden was required to attend in person. During that hearing, the judge ordered attorneys to comply with requests for information and to avoid blank or vague answers. 

Three weeks after Mr. Biden appeared in court, Ms. Roberts’s attorneys alleged he was “playing games with discovery” by failing to disclose an accurate picture of his financial portfolio. They claimed his lack of transparency is a “willful and contemptuous violation” of the court’s orders. They asked that he be held in criminal contempt and placed in jail pending release of the documents, something Judge Meyer did not do. 

“Mr. Biden does not want to disclose his income and assets, says that he is somewhat financially destitute, while he lives on a mountain overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, has Secret Service protection, and enjoys his time abroad,” Ms. Roberts’s legal team wrote. 

California’s Malibu is one of the most expensive towns in the country, home to billionaires and A-list Hollywood stars. Mr. Biden currently lives there with his wife and their son. 

Another source of intrigue surrounding the income of Mr. Biden fils is how much money he’s made from the sales of artwork he painted and sold through a gallery in recent years. Some of the abstract paintings were priced in the tens of thousands of dollars, eye-raising price tags for work by a self-taught artist so new to the art world. As is often the case in the art world, the identities of the buyers has remained secret and, in the case of Mr. Biden’s paintings, so has the actual prices they fetched. 

This is the third time Mr. Biden has been faced with the threat of jail time. Ms. Roberts had filed a “motion of contempt” that also sought to put Mr. Biden in the county jail. Ms. Roberts’s attorneys asked that the court “incarcerate the defendant in the Cleburne County Detention Center until he complies with this court’s orders and answers discovery.”

Mr. Biden is also facing multiple federal investigations, including a congressional inquiry being conducted by the House Oversight Committee and a criminal investigation by prosecutors in Delaware investigating whether he committed tax fraud and lied about his drug problem in order to purchase a firearm. 

Two whistleblowers have since come forward to allege wrongdoing by the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice in their probe into Mr. Biden, saying the investigation was slow-walked. 

The agents, charged with investigating Hunter Biden’s possible tax fraud, say they were taken off the case after telling the FBI that their superiors were going easy on Mr. Biden. 

In an email to the IRS commissioner, Daniel Werfel, one of the anonymous former agent said he was fired for raising concerns that the Department of Justice was “acting inappropriately” during the investigation. The agent claimed the firing was “retaliation against a whistleblower who alleged his colleagues were covering up the president’s son’s financial crimes.”

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which has interviewed one of the IRS whistleblowers, has said that “dark money” groups have been cutting checks to intimidate members of Congress. 

“I’ll put it like that with respect to witness intimidation,” Mr. Comer said. “I mean just look in my district. We’ve got dark money groups that are being funded through prominent high-ranking Democrat officials in Congress. Also the communications director for the White House continues to retweet things trying to intimidate me.”