Who Is Mark Scarsi? Judge in Hunter Biden Tax Fraud Case Revealed

A judge who condemned an “abhorrent” protest against Jewish students at a California university is to oversee Hunter Biden’s tax evasion case.
Judge Mark Scarsi, a Trump appointee, made international headlines on August 14 when he placed an injunction on a college protest at the University of California, Los Angeles, that blocked students from passing certain areas on campus unless they denounced the state of Israel.
He is now set to oversee Hunter Biden’s tax trial, which is scheduled to begin in Los Angeles in September. Prosecutors say Hunter Biden, the 54-year-old son of President Joe Biden, failed to pay $1.4 million in federal taxes from 2016 to 2019. He faces three felony tax offenses and six misdemeanor tax offenses.
In an injunction decree in the UCLA case, Scarsi wrote: “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.
“This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.”
Scarsi said that although the university claimed no responsibility for the pro-Palestinian protest, “UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.”
Jury selection in Hunter Biden’s case is set to take place on September 5, with a trial start date set for September 9.
Special counsel David Weiss’ team told Scarsi that a witness would testify about Hunter Biden’s alleged arrangement with a Romanian businessperson who was trying to “influence U.S. government policy” during Joe Biden’s term as vice president.
Newsweek contacted Hunter Biden’s attorney for comment via email outside normal business hours.
Scarsi has had a varied career. According to his LinkedIn profile, he “worked for seven years as a software engineer, designing and developing detection and signal processing computer systems for U.S. defense applications.”
In a 2010 interview with Lawdragon, a legal website, Scarsi said his work involved assimilating sonar data to better identify enemy torpedoes in the ocean and that he had also worked on submarine defense systems.
He later worked as a patent attorney, drawing on his software background.
He also told Lawdragon that he represented TV Guide magazine in a case before the International Trade Commission.
The dispute involved the use of patented software, and he was able to use his software skills to look at the computer code and impeach the testimony of computer engineers as a result.
He worked for the Los Angeles office of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, where he was a partner for 11 years and led the firm’s West Coast intellectual property practice.
In 2018, Trump nominated Scarsi as a federal judge for the Central District of California, and he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September 15, 2020.