It should be an open-and-shut case.
At least, that's what we naively thought until First Son Hunter Biden was handed a sweetheart deal in July. However, the now-nixed guilty plea offer spectacularly fell apart after the judge presiding over the criminal proceedings — Judge Maryellen Noreika, a Trump appointee — called B.S. on the eyebrow-raising arrangement, which would've allowed Hunter Biden to avoid any jail time.
The trial is scheduled to begin Monday morning with jury selection at the federal courthouse in President Joe Biden's backyard — Wilmington, Delaware. It's supposed to last three to six days, but the introduction of Hunter Biden's infamous laptop into evidence on an item-by-item basis, meaning the defense is permitted to raise objections to each piece of evidence extracted from the device, could spark feuds between parties and stretch the trial far past the one-week timeframe we're expecting.
Townhall will be there all week, so stay tuned for live updates from inside the courtroom.
The three felony firearm charges can be boiled down to Hunter Biden allegedly deceiving a federally licensed firearms dealer, falsely denying his drug addiction on a federal firearms form, and unlawfully possessing the gun that he, thereby, illegally bought.
If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison, plus $750,000 fines and almost a decade of supervised release.
Special counsel David C. Weiss, a Trump-nominated prosecutor retained by the Biden administration, is spearheading the prosecution, which will have to prove that Hunter Biden knowingly lied about his crack addiction on the background check.
The much-anticipated jury trial is expected to delve into Hunter Biden's drug use in relation to when he purchased the .38 special revolver that authorities found after it was thrown into the trash can of a Wilmington-area grocery store, the Janssen's Market.
In mid-October 2018, Hunter Biden bought the Colt Cobra at the StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply gun shop. Any person who purchases a firearm has to fill out paperwork (a Firearms Transaction Record, a.k.a. "ATF Form 4473") required by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). On that background check form, Hunter Biden was asked whether he was an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance, such as crack cocaine; he answered, "No," to the question.
Last week, Judge Noreika barred Hunter Biden's defense attorneys from arguing or suggesting that the prosecution must demonstrate that he did drugs on the day of the gun's purchase. According to ATF's regulations, the prosecutors simply need to show that the substance abuse "occurred recently enough to indicate that the individual is actively engaged in such conduct."
The defense is still disputing what definitions jurors will work with. In a court filing Wednesday, the defense attorneys submitted arguments asking for additional revisions to the jury instructions, asserting that Hunter Biden's understanding of what those terms — drug "user" and "addict" — meant determines whether he "knowingly" believed he was either one at the time of the gun's sale.
"Words sometimes are understood to have different meanings to different people..." Hunter Biden's counsel wrote, attempting to raise a "good faith" defense. "It does not matter whether you or Congress or anyone else would define the defendant as an 'addict' or 'user of controlled substances,' if Mr. Biden did not understand that he was an 'addict' or 'user of a controlled substance' at the time of the alleged charges, he did not knowingly break the law then either and he must be found not guilty."
The mountain of evidence the prosecution has accumulated against Hunter Biden includes his own admissions he published in his memoir, Beautiful Things, where he extensively talked about his "four years of active addiction" spanning from 2015 to 2019.
Excerpts that prosecutors cite in court documents range from Hunter Biden's recounting of rehab and relapses to his self-identification as a crack addict who spent "twenty-four hours a day, smoking every fifteen minutes, seven days a week."
As for the defense, Hunter Biden unsuccessfully sought to toss out the case on grounds that the charges are legally defective. He also failed to outright bar the laptop from being into evidence, claiming it had been hacked and seeded with false information. "[T]he data had been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material..." the defense had asserted.
"The government further requests that the Court prohibit the defendant from suggesting that the electronic evidence is fabricated, manipulated, altered, or inauthentic because he has not offered any evidence supporting such a claim." pic.twitter.com/4jjOg7uPF4
— Tristan Leavitt (@tristanleavitt) May 23, 2024
Hunter Biden's high-profile lawyer, Abbe Lowell, who previously represented Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) in his federal corruption case, is heavily relying on the argument that the user/addict terms were "not defined on the form and were not explained to him."
"Someone, like Mr. Biden who had just completed an 11-day rehabilitation program and lived with a sober companion after that, could surely believe he was not a present tense user or addict," Lowell wrote in response to the prosecution's 20-page trial brief.
The prosecution intends to call on witnesses close to Hunter Biden.
Although they're only identified as Witness 1, Witness 2, and Witness 3, it can be inferred based on the information the prosecution provided ahead of trial that they're Hunter Biden's ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; the widow of Hunter Biden's brother, Hallie Biden, with whom he had an affair; and his baby mama, Lunden Roberts, with whom he fathered five-year-old Navy Joan.
Roberts successfully sued Hunter Biden, who had denied paternity, for being a deadbeat dad, forcing him to pay child support. Navy, the seventh grandchild of President Biden, has been repeatedly snubbed by both Hunter Biden and the Biden family.
Roberts will testify that she "observed the defendant using crack cocaine frequently — every 20 minutes except when he slept."
Days before Hallie Biden's expected testimony, President Biden reportedly visited his daughter-in-law near the ninth anniversary of Beau Biden's death. Hallie Biden had allegedly discarded the handgun that was recovered from the local shop's dumpster.
President Biden tonight stopped by the home of Hallie Biden, his late son Beau Biden’s widow, per the WH.
— Gary Grumbach (@GaryGrumbach) May 27, 2024
Hallie is one of the 12 witnesses prosecutors expect to call in Hunter Biden’s gun case in June.
This week, Judge Noreika swatted down Hunter Biden's last-ditch bid to stop the case from heading to trial, calling the attempt "frivolous" and finding "no reason to believe" that the defense's appeal would be "any more meritorious than his prior efforts."
Hunter Biden's May 14 motion to enjoin the special counsel's investigation and prosecution of him claimed that the use of congressional appropriations to fund Weiss was unconstitutional because the prosecutor is not an "independent counsel."
"Somewhat incongruously, [Biden] has asserted in this case both that he is being selectively prosecuted by a Special Counsel 'making prosecutorial decisions for political reasons,' and that the Special Counsel making those decisions is not actually independent from the Attorney General appointed by his father or the Executive Branch headed by his father," Noreika ruled.
At the pre-trial conference, Lowell asked whether Hunter Biden could participate in any attorney-judge sidebars near the judge's bench at trial. NBC News reported that he is allowed to "wander" around the courtroom, a freedom that not all defendants have.
Hunter Biden is separately staving off tax evasion charges in a California case slated to go to trial this fall.