Now, President Biden's son, Hunter, has made a last-minute decision to plea guilty to tax fraud charges. He was accused of failing to pay nearly $1.5 million in income tax from 2016 to 2019. Initially, Biden said he wanted to enter what is known as an Alfred plea, where he would accept the charges while maintaining his innocence. But prosecutors objected. Our Los Angeles correspondent, Hemavadi, on whether Biden's guilty plea came as a surprise.

It did take everybody by surprise earlier today as everybody was set for a criminal trial. We were expecting to see jury selection, and then the trial to take place this week and next week. But his lawyers came in with this offer, as you say, of this offered guilty plea, which is to accept a guilty verdict, but maintain your innocence. The judge seemed to have some doubts about that, and time was taken to look at the legalities. Then Hunter Biden's team, in the end, decided to go for a straightforward guilty plea. So that really means it spares him a trial. We understand that his main motivation behind the scenes, really, was to spare friends, family, people like that from having to come and testify against him and put people close to him through that ordeal once Again, of course, this isn't his first criminal trial. It's his second because he was found guilty earlier this summer of illegally obtaining a handgun. So that's the last that we'll see of Hunter Biden in court here for now. He will later be sentenced inconstanced in December, crucially after the election has taken place. Now, previously, of course, when his father, President Joe Biden, was running for another term, this trial took on huge significance, and everything that his son, Hunter Biden, did could potentially be used to cast a shadow over Joe Biden as well by his opponents.

Now, though, the stakes, of course, are a lot lower. Joe Biden isn't running for a second term, but there's still, of course, a lot of interest in his son and his particular dealings, too. But some of the drama has been taken out of that today by Hunter Biden's late guilty plea.

Yeah, so one conviction in his previous case and now a guilty plea. Does this bring a close to his legal troubles?

It brings a close to some of the biggest ones that he's had, which was all the money that he spent during the time that he spent as a crack cocaine addict, which he has documented in lots of detail in his memoirs. In this really chaotic period of his life where he was spending money on luxury lifestyle, luxury hotels, cars, women, escorts, strict clubs, things like that. And then writing some of these things off as business expenses, which was the crux of this case. In the previous case, of course, him obtaining a handgun illegally, ticking the box that said he wasn't a drug user when in fact that he was. These are the biggest things that he has faced him as a consequence of that very chaotic period of his life as a drug addict. And by all accounts, he's now clean, he's now trying to live a better life. And that's something that his father, Joe Biden, has said he's very proud of his son for doing. But of course, all of this has laid bare the President's son's lifestyle and all the things he did during that period of his life. And it's been a very difficult thing for Joe Biden as well, who's also suffered a lot of trauma in his life.

So I'm sure the President will be hoping that this helps draw things to a close. Of course, the stakes aren't as high politically high politically as they were when Joe Biden was running for another term.