Jury selection begins Monday in a federal gun case against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter after the collapse of a deal with prosecutors that would have avoided the spectacle of a trial so close to the 2024 election.
Hunter Biden has been charged in Delaware with three felonies stemming from a 2018 firearm purchase when he was, according to his memoir, in the throes of a crack addiction.
He has been accused of lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the application used to screen firearms applicants when he said he was not a drug user and illegally having the gun for 11 days.
If he were to be convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison, though first-time offenders do not get anywhere near the maximum and it’s unclear whether the judge would give him time behind bars.
He is also facing a separate trial in California, scheduled to start in September, on charges of failing to pay $1.4 million US in taxes.
Both cases were to have been resolved through a deal with prosecutors last July, the culmination of a years-long investigation into his business dealings, but the lawyers squabbled over the agreement, could not come to a resolution and the deal fell apart.
Attorney General Merrick Garland then appointed the top investigator as a special counsel in August, and a month later Hunter Biden was indicted.
This trial isn’t about Hunter Biden’s foreign business affairs — which Republicans have seized on without evidence to try to paint the Biden family as corrupt. But it will excavate some of Hunter Biden’s darkest moments and put them on display.
Hunter Biden was with his father all weekend before the case began, biking with his dad and attending church together. The president’s wife, Jill, was on hand at the courthouse on Monday morning.
Former romantic partners could testify
The case against Hunter Biden stems from a period when, by his own public admission, he was addicted to crack. His descent into drugs and alcohol followed the 2015 cancer death of his brother, Beau Biden. He bought and owned a gun for 11 days in October 2018 and indicated on the gun purchase form that he was not using drugs.
Prosecutors have said they’re planning to use as evidence his published memoir, and they may also introduce contents from a laptop that he left at a Delaware repair shop and never retrieved.
Prosecutors are also planning to call as witnesses his ex-wife and his brother’s widow, Hallie, with whom Hunter Biden became romantically involved.
Biden’s defence has accused prosecutors of cherry-picking evidence, and they’ve argued the case never would have been brought had the defendant not been the president’s son. They got the judge agree to their bid to keep out of the jury’s presence other details about Hunter Biden’s past, including a child-support case in Arkansas and his dismissal from the Navy after a positive drug test.
The judge will ask a group of prospective jurors a series of questions to determine whether they can serve impartially on the jury, including whether they have donated to political campaigns or run for political office. She will ask whether their views about the 2024 presidential campaign prevent them from being impartial.
She’s also going to ask whether prospective jurors believe Hunter Biden is being prosecuted because his father is the president.
The trial comes just days after Donald Trump, the Republican party’s presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, was convicted of 34 felonies in New York City. A jury found the former president guilty of a scheme to cover up a hush money payment to a porn actor to fend off damage to his 2016 presidential campaign. The two criminal cases are unrelated, but their proximity underscores how the criminal courtroom has taken centre stage during this campaign.