Hunter Biden is staring down a mountain of evidence against him in his gun case and a real possibility of a felony conviction, a scenario that he nearly avoided if not for a controversial string of events last summer.
Special counsel David Weiss, the U.S. attorney of Delaware, went into the trial this week on firm footing and has many facts on his side, but legal experts differ on whether the case against the first son came about fairly.
Biden is facing three felonies and the possibility of months or even years in prison over allegations that he lied on a federal form about his drug use to purchase a revolver in 2018 and that he then illegally kept the gun for 11 days while he was an unlawful drug user.
The Delaware U.S. attorney’s office rarely pursues charges under the laws Biden is now accused of violating, according to the last decade of court records there.
Still, conservative attorney Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, told the Washington Examiner the case is appropriate.
“Hunter Biden got the gun and handled it recklessly, resulting in its being discarded near a school. Such a case should get charged 10 times out of 10,” McCarthy said, noting Democrats, who are typically gun-control advocates, should be glad the DOJ is enforcing laws in that arena.
President Joe Biden, a proponent of stricter gun laws, is in the awkward position of having signed a bill that strengthened penalties for a charge his own son is now facing.
More unusual than the younger Biden’s charges, which are being brought by his father’s Department of Justice and not commonly prosecuted, is the trial scene itself.
Secret Service guard the proceedings. Along with Hunter Biden, several other members of Joe Biden’s family, including first lady Jill Biden, have appeared at the courthouse, either as support or witnesses. Some witnesses have taken the stand and said they received immunity deals to avoid incriminating themselves while testifying. The courtroom and an overflow room are filled with dozens of reporters observing deeply personal evidence regarding Hunter Biden’s struggles with addiction and tumultuous relationships with women and family members.
How Hunter’s case began
Prosecutors uncovered the evidence through a five-year federal investigation of the first son that attracted national media attention and intense scrutiny from Republicans who initially felt he was receiving preferential treatment.
Charles Oberly, a former Delaware attorney general and Weiss’s one-time superior at the U.S. attorney’s office, cited the rare nature of the gun charges and said he could “not conceive of an office spending resources” on such a case.
“When viewed against those [gun charge] statistics, the choice to make an example of the younger Biden raises, at a minimum, questions,” Oberly said in an op-ed for USA Today.
The inquiry into Hunter Biden was always far more complex than a narrow case about a single incident related to a gun purchase, though.
It started at the end of 2018 as “an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform,” Gary Shapley, one of the criminal investigators at the time, told Congress.
Upon the FBI obtaining Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop by subpoenaing a repair shop for it the following year, it transformed into a white-collar investigation of potential tax crimes and Foreign Agents Registration Act violations.
Plea bargain blow-up
Weiss ultimately negotiated a plea agreement in the summer of 2023 that would have allowed Hunter Biden to scrape by with two misdemeanor tax charges while avoiding one gun violation, but with the caveat that he could still be charged for certain other offenses in the future.
That deal aligned with DOJ cases with “similar fact patterns,” former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori wrote in a column.
Judge Maryellen Noreika, a Donald Trump appointee who is presiding over the gun case, unexpectedly rejected certain provisions of the deal at a hearing last July. She gave Hunter Biden and Weiss an opportunity to address the immunity aspects of the deal, but the parties reached an impasse on how to proceed. Later that year, Attorney General Merrick Garland made Weiss a special counsel, and the first son was hit with the gun charges in Delaware and then nine tax charges in California.
“There are real reasons to believe this case should have never even gotten to a jury, based on a clear-eyed view of how the American legal system typically works,” Khardori wrote, noting Noreika seemed “bothered” by the underwhelming charges in the deal.
This all occurred against the backdrop of Republicans in Congress publicly blasting the DOJ for what they described as a failed “sweetheart” deal and a lack of accountability for Hunter Biden’s behavior that was driven by politics. When the tax charges later came down, they applauded the indictment as the result of whistleblowers exposing that the DOJ had, in their eyes, originally planned to let the first son off easy.
Oberly indicated he felt the DOJ improperly caved to congressional pressure.
“Addicts and nonaddicts alike make mistakes every day; no office has the ability or desire to prosecute each infraction,” he said. “And certainly no office should chase felony convictions and jail time in a misguided effort to appease either side in Congress.”
Suggesting that Hunter Biden has been unfairly targeted and that he is now facing prosecution that an average American would not face is a “specious argument,” McCarthy said.
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After all, between congressional investigations, indictments, the leaked data of Hunter Biden’s computer data, and the first son’s own admissions in his memoir, it became apparent that his behavior during his adult life was not like that of an average American and also may not have been entirely aboveboard. It featured dark periods of crack cocaine and alcohol addiction intermixed with periods of galavanting around the globe wielding his father’s name to rake in millions of dollars from foreign entities.
“If Hunter hadn’t been Biden’s son, he’d have been prosecuted back in late 2018 or early 2019 — instead, the prosecutor did nothing for 5 years then tried to make the case disappear,” McCarthy said. “The normal defendant does not get such indulgence.”
