Former President Joe Biden was reportedly so desperate to defend his son Hunter that he wanted to testify in his federal gun trial, according to a stunning new book. The revelation adds to growing concerns over the president's judgment and his willingness to blur the lines between personal loyalty and the impartiality of the justice system.
According to a portion of "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson, Biden reportedly made multiple offers to testify in his son Hunter’s federal gun trial in Delaware last June. However, Tapper and Thompson note that the idea of a sitting president testifying in his own son's trial would have only intensified the media frenzy surrounding the case. The trial took place during a critical point in Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign, and the authors noted it served as a major distraction for him during one of the most pivotal moments of the election year.
Biden reportedly had information that might have supported the defense’s case by shedding light on Hunter’s mental state in October 2018, when he unlawfully bought and owned a firearm while using drugs. However, Hunter’s legal team ultimately decided that putting the president on the stand was too risky and could potentially do more harm than good. Instead, the former president put out a statement saying that he wouldn’t be commenting on the pending federal cases against his son.
Former First Lady Jill Biden also offered to testify at Hunter’s trial, but she reportedly “had not witnessed much of Hunter’s downturn [into addiction] in 2018; her testimony would be less useful.”
Hunter’s daughter Naomi did testify at the trial. Thompson said that “she clearly wanted to help her father convince jurors that he wasn't taking drugs when he bought a gun in 2018 and signed a federal form swearing he wasn't a drug user.”
However, “probing questions and old text messages presented by the prosecution ... made the president's son look more like an erratic dad than a good father who was getting sober in the week after he bought the gun."
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