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04-06-2024
HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA: With the strike of a judge’s gavel in Delaware, Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, will become the first child of a sitting president to be a criminal defendant.
Prosecutors allege that the younger Biden, 54, lied about his drug use on application forms when he purchased a handgun in 2018.
He faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted of the three federal counts, in a case that will get under way on Monday with jury selection.
Biden has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The trial which comes as his father campaigns for re-election – is likely to see prosecutors delve into graphic details of Biden’s crack cocaine addiction, potentially providing fodder for the president’s political foes.
Here is what we know about the case.
Biden is facing three federal charges in the case: two counts of making false statements and one count of illegal gun possession.
The charges all relate to his purchase of a revolver at a Delaware gun store in October 2018, which he kept for about 11 days.
By Biden’s own admission, he was deep in the throes of a “full blown addiction” to crack cocaine at the time.
The two false statement charges stem from allegations that he lied about his drug use on a federally-mandated form when he purchased the weapon.
Specifically, prosecutors allege that he falsely claimed that he was “not an unlawful user of and addicted to any stimulant narcotic drug” when he purchased a Colt Cobra Special revolver.
The third count is related to his possession of a firearm while alleged to have been a drug user.
The gun was discarded and discovered at a grocery store in Greenville, Delaware, prompting an investigation that ultimately led investigators back to the forms.
To convict Biden, prosecutors will have to convince jurors that he knowingly made false statements on the form in a bid to deceive the store that sold him the pistol.
Additionally, they will have to prove that Biden was a drug user or addicted to drugs, and took possession of the gun despite knowing as much.
US District Judge Maryellen Noreika has already ruled that defence lawyers cannot argue that the prosecution can only get a guilty verdict by proving Biden was using drugs on the day he bought the weapon.
Instead, in a pre-trial hearing, the judge agreed with prosecutors’ argument that they need only prove that “unlawful use (had) occurred recently enough to indicate that the individual (was) actively engaged in such conduct”.
In court filings made ahead of the trial’s start, prosecutors suggested that they would rely, in part, on deeply personal text messages and other communications made while Biden was in the throes of addiction.
In one such text message cited in court documents, Biden refers to himself as a “liar and a thief and a blame and a user and I’m delusional and an addict unlike beyond and above all other addicts that you know”.
The prosecution is also expected to rely on the testimonies of witnesses including ex-wife Kathleen Buhle and Biden’s ex-partner Hallie Biden who is also the widow of Biden’s brother Beau. Prosecutors will also be able to point to Biden’s own 2021 memoir, in which he detailed his experiences as a drug user who was “up twenty-four hours a day, smoking every 15 minutes, seven days a week”.
“All my energy revolved around smoking drugs and making arrangements to buy drugs feeding the beast,” he wrote in the book.
