Hunter Biden ordered to appear in court and explain why he seeks to pay less in child support for the 4-year-old daughter he's neglected to meet

President Joe Biden announced Tuesday he is running for re-election. An Arkansas judge announced Monday the president's son is done running from accountability.

The Honorable Holly L. Meyer of the 16th Judicial Circuit Court of Arkansas has ordered Hunter Biden, 53, to appear at the Independence County courthouse in Batesville on May 1 as well as for all subsequent hearings pertaining to his ongoing paternity case, reported the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

"From now on ... I want both of your clients at every hearing I conduct," Meyer said. "I will no longer allow us to excuse clients ... because it is interfering with the progress of litigation, which is taking way too long to get over simple points."

The matter at hand is Hunter Biden's apparent desire to pay less in child support for the daughter he sired out of wedlock in 2018 with former stripper Lunden Roberts.

The long road to Arkansas

Following the birth of the Navy Joan Roberts, Biden denied being the father (a paternity test later proved his parentage "with near scientific certainty") and refused Roberts' pleas to help care for the child. Consequently, Roberts sued him in an Arkansas court.

TheBlaze reported that Biden defied the resulting court order to turn over financial information relevant to the case, refusing also to provide a list of the companies he owned or had an ownership interest in (e.g., Rosemont Seneca Partners, the "$2.4 billion private equity firm" he founded with former Secretary of State John Kerry's stepson Christopher Heinz) and a list of all of his sources of income.

To avoid a contempt charge, Biden agreed to pay child support retroactive to November 2018, and in January 2020, Roberts and Biden agreed on temporary child support.

Judge Meyer subsequently ordered that these payments were to continue indefinitely and to be paid on the first of each month.

The court order setting Biden's monetary obligations to Roberts and their daughter were filed under seal on March 12, 2020, approximately one year after he reportedly resigned from the board of Burisma, the energy exploration holding company based in Ukraine, where he was making roughly $50,000 per month.

Biden disturbed the status quo in September 2022, figuring he might be able to strike a new deal — one in which he would pay less in child support for the daughter that neither he nor his father, Joe Biden, have ever met.

Court or prison

Lawyers for Roberts argued in a Friday filing that Biden should be thrown in the Cleburne County Detention Center until such time as he complies with a court order to hand over documents pertaining to his financials, reported the Daily Mail.

According to Lancaster, Biden has been "[flouting] the dignity and authority of the court" by failing to satisfy discovery rules and deadlines, specified at a Feb. 22 hearing.

"In those two months, the defendant has provided no additional discovery — not so much as one single item or word — and has failed to supplement his answers at the court’s directive," Lancaster added in the filing. "There is no valid excuse or justification for the defendant’s failure to provide the required disclosures as the court has granted every single protective order the defendant has asked for since the inception of this case … the defendant is playing games with this court."

If the court would not lock Biden up, Roberts' lawyers wrote that it should instead "sanction the defendant as appropriate and just," noting that the first son should be ordered to appear.

An episode during a Zoom hearing Monday with attorneys for Biden and Roberts appears to have made Meyer's decision easier to make.

On the call, Brent Langdon, Biden's attorney in the case, tiptoed around the matter of the controversial Hunter Biden laptop, whereon income tax records are allegedly saved.

The Democrat-Gazette reported that Langdon referenced the laptop Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop in 2019 in relation to a potential expert witness in the case, Garrett Ziegler, a self-proclaimed experts on the device's contents.

"There has never been, to my knowledge, an acknowledgment that this so-called laptop — he continuously calls it Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop ..." said Langdon.

Judge Meyer interjected: "Well, let's clear that issue up right now. ... Is it your client's laptop or not?"

Langdon responded, "Your honor, I'm not involved in all of that stuff. ... It's not my client's laptop as far as I know."

The judged pressed Langdon on the matter, emphasizing that she holds clients to what their lawyers say in court.

"Is it your client's position, you're representing to this court, that it is not his laptop?" asked Judge Meyer.

Langdon answered, "Your honor, I am not in a position to even begin to answer that question."

Evidently tired of playing cat and mouse, Judge Meyer thereafter ordered Biden to Arkansas and indicated that both parties have to comply fully with discovery requests by May 22.

The trial is scheduled for July 24-25. Biden will also face grilling in a June deposition about his foreign entanglements and various business ventures.