Who is Mark Scarsi, the judge assigned to Hunter Biden’s new tax charges case?

Mark Scarsi is the U.S. district court judge who will preside over the case involving the latest federal indictment against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

Scarsi, who is based in the Central District of California and was nominated by President Donald Trump, has served since 2020 on a bench that presides over Los Angeles.

The judge was randomly assigned to oversee the latest Hunter Biden case after he was indicted Thursday on nine tax-related charges, including three felony counts, according to court documents filed in a federal court in Los Angeles.

In February, Scarsi sentenced the owner of a construction company to two years in prison for failing to pay $1.6 million in taxes on more than $4.8 million in income over a five-year period and ordered him to pay $1.6 million in restitution.

Over the last year, Scarsi also sentenced a man to 10 years in prison for defrauding eight women, including some with whom he had romantic relationships, as well as nine businesses, and then laundering the money. He also sentenced a pharmacist to two years in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to forging prescriptions to illegally sell opioids.

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Last year, Scarsi sentenced low-budget film actor Zachary Joseph Horwitz to 20 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to bilking investors out of an estimated $650 million. Scarsi also ordered Horwitz to pay more than $230 million he kept from the scheme, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles said at the time.

Scarsi was born in Syracuse, New York, and studied computer and information science at Syracuse University, where he obtained both a bachelor’s and master’s degree. Scarsi worked as a software engineer on defense projects for the Lockheed Martin Corp. before attending Georgetown University Law Center, where he graduated with a law degree in 1996, according to biographical information provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee when he was nominated for the federal judgeship.

After receiving his degree, Scarsi worked in private practice at various law firms for more than two decades before he was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California to fill a vacant seat following the 2017 retirement of Judge George H. King.

His legal practice has centered on civil litigation with an emphasis on intellectual property and has included Fortune 100 clients like Google and Apple, while his litigation experience has included federal district courts in California, New York, Delaware and Texas. Before his judgeship, Scarsi had tried 28 cases.

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In 2007, Scarsi joined Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy as partner, where he led the firm’s West Coast intellectual property litigation and technology practice until he was appointed as a federal judge. He became a managing partner at that firm’s LA office in 2013.

His work there included representing and defending patent holders in patent infringement actions, in addition to representing clients in patent and trademark infringement claims before the federal International Trade Commission.

Scarsi was nominated and eventually confirmed by the Senate in a 83-12 vote in 2020.

Scarsi has been a longtime member of the invitation-only Los Angeles-based social club known as the California Club and became a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association and the Federalist Society in 2017.