Hunter Biden’s first trial, which began this week, is not about conservatives’ claims that he is at the center of some of the broader Biden family corruption stories. It instead focused on a particularly messy incident: Hunter’s purchase of a gun in 2018.
During those years, Hunter struggled with what is now drug and alcohol addiction informativeBut when buying a gun, he A box is checked A form stated that he did not use drugs. For that, prosecutors charged him with violating three different laws in Delaware: two false statement laws and a law that prohibits the possession of firearms by a drug user. (They also indicted him on the tax charges in California, where he faces a separate trial in September.)
The gun charge stood out as unusual. experts there is said. They focus on an incident about six years old in which no one was injured, and on a defendant who became sober about five years ago.
Even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said this week: “I don’t think the average American should be accused of gun stuff” (though his opinion may also reflect a general Republican lack of strict enforcement of gun laws).
So is Hunter Biden really getting a raw deal? Is the Justice Department coming down on him more harshly than usual — perhaps because they are anxious to avoid criticism from Republicans and assert their independence from politics?
The complicated backstory of the investigation suggests that some of it is that prosecutors came down hard on Hunter after the politics of the situation turned ugly for them. But that history also reveals a more complicated story where at times prosecutors didn’t seem particularly interested in charging Hunter, and where Hunter’s refusal to take a revised deal helped get him to this point.
The key question is similar to the one that came up in Trump’s New York trial and conviction: Did prosecutors get tougher on him because of politics? The plaintiff in the case I disagree that Accusations of falsifying business records were common in Manhattan, but critics argued That many specific aspects of Trump’s allegations were highly unusual and highly unlikely to be employed against anyone other than Trump.
Hunter was certainly a legitimate target for investigation, and it’s not uncommon for prosecutors to come down hard on a defendant who won’t agree to their preferred plea terms. But it is impossible to exclude politics from the case: it influenced it from the beginning.
Politics has long been heated over the Hunter Biden investigation
In 2018, Hunter Biden—who had long worked as a lobbyist and then an advisor and consultant to high-paying foreign clients—was heavily addicted to drugs, living large and often behaving erratically.
That year, bank records involving his suspicious transactions caught the attention of both the Justice Department and the IRS, which opened an investigation into him. Almost immediately, Hunter’s notoriety affected things. The IRS agent who opened the case said he was inspired by media articles about Hunter’s messy divorce, which involved complaint That he spent a lot on drugs and prostitution.
But it became clear that this was not a very common occurrence in 2019 and 2020, as:
- Joe Biden became the front-runner to challenge President Trump and then the Democratic nominee
- Trump and his allies began publicly demanding investigations of Hunter and Biden, both by his own Justice Department and the Ukrainian government, in a push that eventually led to his (first) impeachment.
- A computer store repairman turned over a laptop containing Hunter’s personal information to the FBI — and, eventually, to Rudy Giuliani, who began leaking its contents to the press.
Hunter also became sober during this period and stopped working for foreign clients.
Despite Trump’s willingness to prosecute the Bidens while in office, the 2020 election looms and prosecutors have been wary of taking over-investigative steps that could leak and influence the outcome. Then, once Biden was in office, the new president keep U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss, who was overseeing the case, in his post (to avoid criticism of interfering with the investigation). The new attorney general, Merrick Garland, promised that Weiss would remain free.
Investigators conducted an extensive investigation into Hunter’s business affairs, but after exploring several possibilities, they decided their best evidence was on two fronts.
The first was taxes. Hunter had failed to file or pay taxes for several years, and investigators believe he lied on his tax forms for a year.
The second was the gun incident. On October 12, 2018, Hunter purchased a gun in Wilmington, Delaware. As part of the purchase, he filled out a form stating that he was not a user of illegal drugs. The gun became a problem when Hallie Biden (the widow of her late brother, who Hunter was dating at the time) found out about it, worried that she might harm herself, and threw it in an outside trash can. Texts he sent at the time made it clear he wasn’t particularly stable, but no one was hurt.
The gun incident was never the focus of any investigation into Hunter, but it was a seemingly clear case of an open-and-shut crime: He said on the form that he wasn’t a drug user, but he was. A very long investigation into alleged corruption ends like this, a False statement on a federal form — with something clear and written, rather than something vague and difficult to establish. Gun charges were always mixed throughout the long investigation Hunter had some leverage.
But in late 2022, US Attorney Weiss believed the case was not strong enough to justify charges, According to the New York Times. So he hoped to strike a plea deal with Hunter’s team.
Duplicate charges from plea agreement
As the investigation concluded, displeasure about it began to leak from officials, media And Congressional republican. Two such officials with the IRS eventually came forward as whistleblowers, giving public interviews and testifying extensively to Congress, arguing that the DOJ had gone soft on the president’s son. A lot of Republican criticism ensued.
Despite all this, Weiss’ team and Hunter eventually reached a plea agreement, which was announcement In June. Under the deal, Hunter will plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges, admit to illegally possessing a firearm while a drug user and possibly avoid jail time.
But when the deal went before Judge Marilyn Noreka for her approval in July, her questioning revealed that the prosecution and defense disagreed on what the deal actually meant.
The main disagreement was the chance of immunity that would be granted to Hunter. The defense insisted they understood it to be a broad grant of immunity for any prosecution involving his business affairs from 2016 to 2019. Prosecutors said, no, they didn’t mean it that way So Judge Noreka blocked the deal and asked both parties to work it out.
In the weeks that followed, though, it became clear that they couldn’t make it work. Weiss suggested Same basic deal again – Without guarantee of immunity. Hunter’s team refused. Weiss then sued him for the gun incident in Delaware and the tax charges in California (where he lived at the time).
One explanation for why the deal fell apart is that prosecutors suddenly became irrational, changing the terms of an immunity deal they were originally comfortable with, perhaps in response to political criticism.
It seems pretty clear that Weiss’ thinking changed as the whistleblowers went public and criticism from Republicans intensified. His office has also changed. The Assistant U.S. Attorney who negotiated the plea agreement, Leslie Wolff, suddenly felt Take a reduced role, while Leo Wise, a prosecutor with an aggressive reputationJoined the team.
Another explanation, though, is that Hunter was also pushing too hard. Instead of settling for a deal that dropped the tax and gun cases against him, Hunter’s team demanded broader immunity for other potential crimes as well. It is true that the prosecutors seemed willing to give it to him at first and only later changed their stance. But Hunter still had a choice about whether to take the modified deal, and he decided to gamble on his chances in court.
So, is the case against Hunter defensible, or has it been politicized? Yes and yes.
The evidence against Hunter in the gun case seems strong, but it would have been unlikely to have been brought up if his name had been Hunter Smith. Politics clearly influenced prosecution decisions. But that doesn’t mean their decisions are unstoppable, and Hunter’s choices matter here too.
