High-profile Baltimore prosecutor assigned to Hunter Biden case in Delaware

Leo Wise, the Baltimore prosecutor who has handled major cases against corrupt cops and politicians, has a new high-profile assignment: the federal charges against the president’s son, Hunter Biden.

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday unveiled the charges against Biden, who agreed to plead guilty to tax offenses and enter into a pretrial diversion agreement to avoid prosecution on a felony gun charge.

David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware, announced the charges and oversaw the investigation into Biden that launched in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump.

The Biden case is reuniting Wise with his onetime partner in prosecution, Assistant U.S. Attorney Derek E. Hines, who left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore in 2020 for a job as a federal prosecutor in Philadelphia.

Court records show that an assistant U.S. attorney from the Delaware office, Benjamin Wallace, is also assigned to the Biden case alongside Wise and Hines. Wallace joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware earlier this year, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Andrew I. Alperstein, a prominent Baltimore defense attorney who has handled cases opposite Wise and Hines, said it makes sense to bring in outside prosecutors because of the Biden family’s long history in Delaware.

President Joseph R. Biden represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate for decades before becoming Barack Obama’s vice president in 2009; Biden’s older son, Beau Biden, was the attorney general for Delaware before his death in 2015.

“It makes sense to me to get people out-of-district because there are a lot of connections between the Biden family and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in that state,” Alperstein said.

RELATED: Hunter Biden will plead guilty in a deal that likely avoids time behind bars in a tax and gun case

Wise and Hines also have experience handling white-collar crime and high-profile prosecutions, he said.

“It makes good sense to put that team back together again,” Alperstein said.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland declined to comment Tuesday on whether Wise is still working out of the Baltimore office.

Wise is currently in the middle of a major case in Maryland — the mortgage fraud and perjury case against former Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby is set to begin heating up again soon as it nears a fall trial date.

He and Hines worked together to prosecute members of the Gun Trace Task Force, a corrupt unit of the Baltimore Police Department that systematically robbed suspects and violated the civil rights of city residents for years.

The two men also handled the case against Kenneth W. Ravenell, a well-known Baltimore defense lawyer who was found guilty of laundering drug money in 2021 and is still appealing his conviction.

Prosecutors also indicted Ravenell’s original defense attorney, Joshua Treem, who was acquitted of all charges at his joint trial with Ravenell.

Treem was accused of interviewing a government witness with the goal of taking him “off the board,” or locking him into a false story that would benefit Ravenell if the witness testified against him. Treem and his supporters said the interview was standard practice for defense lawyers, who test the government’s evidence before trial and seek exculpatory information about their clients.

The Treem prosecution rankled Baltimore’s defense bar and created a lasting rift with Wise, who was uninvited as the guest speaker at a law club dinner last month after some members complained.

U.S. Attorney Erek L. Barron, who took over the office in October 2021, also added last year new safeguards that must be met before federal prosecutors can surreptitiously monitor lawyers. The move was seen as an effort to mend the strained relationship between the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the defense bar following the Treem prosecution.

There have also been signs of turmoil in the U.S. Attorney’s Office: The Baltimore Sun reported in March that Wise had been demoted from his position as chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Public Corruption and Fraud Unit and temporarily pulled off the Mosby prosecution, though he was quickly reinstated to the case.

Wise also signed onto an explosive court filing last month that accused numerous criminal defense firms and lawyers of profiting from the Ravenell money laundering scheme. The filing was submitted in response to a routine request from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to file an amicus brief in Ravenell’s case, which is before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The government withdrew the filing just days later, and a new attorney was added to the case.