A jury was selected Monday afternoon in the trial of presidential son Hunter Biden, after prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed on a dozen jurors from a pool that reportedly exceeded 200 potential members.
The Delaware trial of President Joe Biden’s son is based on three charges related to lying on a form regarding a gun purchase while addicted to cocaine.
Special counsel David Weiss secured the grand jury indictment of the president’s son on drug-related gun charges. Weiss separately secured a grand jury indictment against the younger Biden on federal tax charges in California.
In an odd twist of the 2024 election cycle, the first of two trials of the first son of a sitting president to be criminally indicted comes just days after Biden’s once and future electoral opponent, Donald Trump, became the first former president to be convicted in a criminal trial. A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of all 34 felony counts of falsifying documents to cover up alleged affairs before he ran for president in 2016.
The younger Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, filed several motions to dismiss the charges, including a Second Amendment defense, which U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika has rejected as the judge in the case.
The president’s son, 54, has stirred controversy by making overseas business deals in Russia, China, Ukraine, and Romania, and by leveraging his father’s previous elected office as vice president to advance his financial interests.
First lady Jill Biden, on her 73rd birthday, attended the first day of the trial in Wilmington, Delaware.
The three-count indictment accuses Hunter Biden of lying on a form to purchase a Colt Cobra revolver by not revealing his addiction to crack cocaine. Conviction on the three gun-related charges could bring Biden up to 25 years in prison.
The indictments says that “the defendant, Robert Hunter Biden, provided a written statement on Form 4473 certifying he was not an unlawful user of, and addicted to, any stimulant, narcotic drug, and any other controlled substance, when in fact, as he knew, that statement was false and fictitious.”
The president has said repeatedly that his son did nothing wrong and that he is proud of him for overcoming a drug addiction.
The trial begins almost a year after it appeared that the younger Biden’s legal troubles had reached an end with a favorable plea agreement with federal prosecutors on tax and gun charges, an agreement widely viewed as a sweetheart deal.
Noreika rejected the plea deal as judge in the case, however.
After that, Attorney General Merrick Garland (who was appointed by the president) named Weiss, U.S. attorney for Delaware in the Trump administration, as special counsel.
In September, Weiss’ team secured the grand jury indictment on three counts. Two charges are related to allegations that the president’s son lied on the gun-purchase form by claiming to be drug-free. The third charge alleges that Biden possessed the revolver while using narcotics.
In December, prosecutors secured another indictment of the younger Biden in Los Angeles on tax crimes related to his business dealings. However, the statute of limitations has elapsed for many of the most questionable activities—which are under review in the House’s impeachment inquiry into the elder Biden.
The younger Biden’s second federal trial is set to begin in September.
Weiss team prosecutors Derek Hines and Leo Wise said their case would include Biden’s memoir, which details his drug use in October 2018. Prosecutors also suggested they would call women from the younger Biden’s past to be witnesses, including ex-wife Kathleen Buhle; Hallie Biden, widow of his late brother Beau Biden, who had an affair with Hunter; and a third woman identified as Zoe Kasten.
Prosecutors on the Weiss team have said they confirmed the authenticity of Biden’s laptop and its contents, first revealed by the New York Post in late 2020. They assert in a May 22 court filing that “the defendant’s laptop is real … and it contains significant evidence of the defendant’s guilt.”
