FILE – Hunter Biden walks to board Air Force One at John F. Kennedy International Airport, March 29, 2024, in New York.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
A jury of Hunter Biden’s peers returned guilty verdicts on all three counts following a speedily conducted federal trial in Delaware for felony gun acquisition and possession charges going back to 2018, a win for special counsel David Weiss.
It seemed last summer that Biden’s tax and gun charges would be resolved by a plea agreement, but when that deal fell apart, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Weiss as special counsel, soon after leading to separate indictments on the West Coast and East Coast.
The East Coast case has now its course in the trial court, and with historic results: Hunter Biden has become the first child of a sitting U.S. president, here President Joe Biden, to face a federal criminal trial and conviction while his parent holds the pardon power that comes with the highest office in the land.
Jurors began deliberations on Monday but only took under an hour to do so before going home. The jury returned Tuesday to continue deliberations and around 11 a.m. word began to spread that they’d already reached a verdict, meaning that there was approximately three hours of deliberations in total.
The result? Guilty verdicts on all three charges.
In a recent interview with ABC News, the president said he would not pardon his son if the jury went on to find him guilty, so if President Biden keeps that promise, Hunter will have to mount a successful appeal in order to obtain a favorable outcome.
Judging by the arguments raised in failed motions for a judgment of acquittal, an appeal may repeat claims that the charges ran afoul of the Second Amendment and that the evidence was not sufficient to convict.
The first charged count alleged that Biden “knowingly made a false and fictitious written statement, intended and likely to deceive” StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply to obtain a Colt Cobra 38SPL revolver, averring that he was not an “unlawful user of, and addicted to, any stimulant, narcotic drug, and any other controlled substance, when in fact, as he knew, that statement was false an fictitious.”
The second count alleged that Biden falsely “certified” to the ATF on “Form 4473” that he was not an unlawful user of or addicted to drugs by checking the boxes “no.”
The third count alleged that Biden illegally possessed the revolver from Oct. 12, 2018 to Oct. 23, 2018, an 11-day period, while “knowing” that he was an unlawful user of or addicted to drugs.
Jurors heard that Hallie Biden, Beau Biden’s widow and the subsequent girlfriend of Hunter Biden, on Oct. 23, 2018, tossed the firearm in the garbage behind a grocery store located across the street from a high school in Delaware, but when she and Hunter went back to the scene later to retrieve the gun, it was gone. The gun was recovered and turned in days later by a man who had sifted through trash, Politico reported. No state charges were brought, but the federal case against Hunter did eventually come.
The jury also heard from the defendant’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle, who reportedly testified about finding drug paraphernalia in Hunter’s car in 2018, not knowing exactly when that year this allegedly took place. Biden ex-girlfriend Zoe Kestan, CNN additionally reported, testified that she saw Hunter smoking crack the month before he bought the revolver.
The defense maintained that, despite its client’s published crack addiction admissions, that the prosecution did not have solid proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Hunter Biden, a trained lawyer, “knowingly” viewed himself as an addict after exiting rehab and buying the revolver at issue by lying.
“And certainly, in a case with a ‘knowingly’ requirement, there is no evidence that when Mr. Biden bought the gun, after having gone through a detoxification and rehabilitation program, he believed that he still suffered from drug addiction or was a present-tense drug user because he had stopped using,” the defense said. “With the benefit of hindsight, we know Mr. Biden’s sobriety did not last, but that does not change the fact that he did not ‘knowingly’ make a false statement in denying in the present tense that he was a drug user or addict.”
An appeal could potentially argue as well that U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika wrongly ruled jurors could not be shown a version of the ATF form that the defense said was “doctored” three years after the fact.
Though the defense had claimed that the form Biden filled out was “doctored” in “material” ways in 2021 before the document was submitted to the ATF,
Noreika found that the defense was trying to confuse the jury with “sideshows” aimed at suggesting the source of the criminal case was partisanship.
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