Hunter Biden is set to battle felony firearm charges in Delaware trial

Hunter Biden will stand trial next week on gun-related charges just as the GOP’s effort to untangle his web of foreign moneymaking fizzles out. While the political will to impeach President Joe Biden over any involvement in his family’s influence peddling has all but disappeared, the belief that the Justice Department gave Hunter Biden favorable treatment has not. In this series, the Washington Examiner will look at where the saga stands on the eve of his first trial. Part 3 previews what to expect during the gun trial. Read part 1 and part 2.

Hunter Biden is set to appear as a defendant in Delaware next week in what could be a short but sensational trial featuring the son of a Democratic president advocating his gun rights while facing his exes and questions about his past addiction to crack.

Biden’s defense team has indicated in court filings that it plans to showcase the nuances of drug addiction at the trial as a jury weighs charges that the first son lied about his addiction in 2018 to purchase a revolver.

Special counsel David Weiss, who is leading the prosecution, has alleged that Biden committed three felonies surrounding the purchase: lying on a federal form about his drug use, allowing the form to exist as a federal record, and possessing the firearm for 11 days while he was a drug user.

Prosecutors plan to get deeply personal to prove their case, according to court filings.

They plan to call on Biden’s ex-wife and ex-girlfriends as witnesses. They also plan to enter into evidence excerpts from Biden’s memoir about his struggles with substance abuse, as well as messages and photos from numerous iterations of his computer data, widely referenced in media under the umbrella term “laptop.”

Barring parties reaching an eleventh-hour plea deal or Biden successfully convincing the judge to grant a late-stage trial postponement, the trial will begin with jury selection on Monday. Judge Maryellen Noreika, who is presiding over the case, estimated the trial could last up to two weeks.

Below is a look at what to expect during it.

Drugs and romance

Prosecutors revealed this year that after Biden was charged last September, investigators tested white residue they found on his leather gun pouch and that the substance was cocaine.

“To be clear, investigators literally found drugs on the pouch where the defendant had kept his gun,” they wrote.

Biden’s defense attorneys aggressively pointed to flaws with that evidence, but prosecutors have doubled down on it and said they plan to bring in a witness at trial to verify the lab results.

If the cocaine is not convincing enough to a jury, though, prosecutors’ evidence of Biden’s drug use goes beyond the post-indictment powder discovery.

“The evidence will be overwhelming that he was a drug user and addict and that he was therefore not honest when he completed the form to purchase the firearm,” former U.S. Attorney John Fishwick of Virginia predicted to the Washington Examiner. “Although folks are sympathetic to addiction, it will be difficult for Hunter Biden to argue he did not know what he was doing when he completed the form to purchase a firearm.”

Biden has said he grappled for most of his life with drug and alcohol addiction and that he became sober in mid-2019. The gun purchase at the center of his charges took place on Oct. 12, 2018.

Prosecutors have said that they plan to present the jury with numerous damning excerpts from Biden’s memoir Beautiful Things.

In the book, the first son shares vivid details about his desperation for crack, including in the months before and after the gun purchase. In early 2019, for example, he wrote that he had “no plan beyond the moment-to-moment demands of the crack pipe.”

“His book is replete with admissions that establish he knew he was an addict and knew he was using crack cocaine throughout 2018, including in October 2018 when he purchased and possessed the gun,” prosecutors wrote.

They also plan to introduce messages and photos they extracted from Biden’s digital data, including from the hard drive of a laptop he left at a repair shop and from his iCloud accounts, to make their point further.

“I was sleeping on a car smoking crack on 4th Street and Rodney,” Biden wrote in one message on Oct. 14, 2018, according to prosecutors.

Additionally, prosecutors have found that some of the best firsthand witnesses to Biden’s addiction battles are his past love interests.

They said they plan to call to the witness stand Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; an Arkansas woman named Lunden Roberts with whom Biden has a daughter; and his late brother Beau Biden’s widow, Hallie Biden, whom he dated after Beau died of brain cancer.

President Joe Biden, for his part, has been largely silent about his son’s upcoming trial, but he raised eyebrows when he visited Hallie Biden over Memorial Day weekend.

Prosecutors have said Hunter Biden was romantically involved with Hallie during the alleged gun purchase and that she will testify that she disposed of the firearm in a public trash can.

Joe Biden’s surprise visit to his daughter-in-law’s home on Monday evening prompted critics, such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), to accuse the president of witness tampering.

“I don’t know the frequency with which Joe Biden visits other members of the family, and many presidents do that,” Cruz said Wednesday on his podcast. “What they don’t do with great frequency is do it … when you’re meeting with a key witness who is about to testify in the trial against your son. That is a dramatically different context, and it raises obvious questions.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre addressed the accusation in a press conference, saying the visit was because of the upcoming anniversary of Beau Biden’s death and unrelated to her anticipated testimony.

‘Clean vehicle’ to push gun rights

Hunter Biden sought to dismiss his charges in the lead-up to the trial, saying the accusation that he illegally possessed a gun while addicted to drugs was incompatible with the Second Amendment.

The district and appellate court both denied his request, ruling that it was premature and that he could argue it again later once the merits of his case were established at trial.

Biden’s attorneys have persisted with the Second Amendment claims in recent court documents in a sign that they plan to shape their defense around it.

They have demanded more tailored definitions of “user of controlled substances” and “addict.” They have called for Noreika, a Donald Trump appointee, to raise the threshold prosecutors must meet to prove exactly when Hunter Biden was on drugs. They have also emphasized their perspective that the gun possession statute in question requires prosecutors to prove that the first son was “simultaneously armed and actively intoxicated” and that he in some way jeopardized the safety of others with the weapon. Weiss “cannot meet that burden,” the attorneys wrote.

Hunter Biden’s case is taking place in the aftermath of a “sea change” in gun regulation, as his attorneys put it. The change can largely be attributed to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a Supreme Court decision in June 2022 that relaxed gun regulations and effectively opened the door for defendants such as Hunter Biden to claim they were lawfully armed despite their controversial circumstances.

Hunter Biden’s Second Amendment arguments have created an awkward scenario for Joe Biden, a proponent of stricter gun laws. The president responded to Bruen at the time by saying it should “deeply trouble us all.” Now it could save his son from a felony conviction.

Amy Swearer, a Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow, said the national attention Joe Biden brings to his son’s case, coupled with the high-powered lawyers working on it, such as Hunter Biden’s lead defense attorney Abbe Lowell, creates a unique opportunity for Second Amendment advocates.

“It is set up to be one of the high-profile Second Amendment cases of the next year or two,” Swearer told the Washington Examiner.

If Hunter Biden is convicted, he could raise his claim with an appellate court that his charges were unconstitutional.

“This is actually a really good vehicle in a really unique way because you have someone who wasn’t picked up for a bunch of other charges,” Swearer said. “He just sort of admits very publicly, ‘Oh, you know, I was using drugs that whole time,’ and so it creates this weirdly clean vehicle for challenging the statute in a way that is not always the case.”

Evidentiary challenges

Hunter Biden’s defense attorneys plan to attempt to discredit the cocaine finding on the leather gun pouch and the claim that the first son knew he was a drug addict in October 2018.

The first son’s yearslong efforts to ignore, deny, or otherwise combat the prolific and salacious headlines that stemmed from operatives obtaining his laptop hard drive in 2020 will also come to a head at the trial, as his attorneys plan to dispute the authenticity of the data.

His attorneys have identified two expert witnesses, a forensic toxicologist and a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction, whom they plan to call to the stand to testify.

The toxicologist will raise chain of custody concerns because the leather pouch was found abandoned in a trash can and the drug test was not performed until October 2023, five years after it was found and a month after Hunter Biden was charged.

“The evidence was held, touched, and controlled by others before the government obtained it from a trash collector” and “there is no dating history whatsoever,” Hunter Biden’s attorneys wrote.

The psychiatrist is expected to testify that addicts commonly are in a “state of denial” about their addiction to suggest that the first son thought his gun form responses in 2018 were truthful.

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As for the computer data, the defense attorneys requested at a recent hearing that they be permitted to raise questions about the authenticity of it at trial, and Noreika said she would allow them to do so. She warned, though, that it could lengthen the duration of the trial.

“Defense counsel has numerous reasons to believe the data had been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material from Apple Inc. and The Mac Shop, such that the Special Counsel’s claim that the underlying data is ‘authentic’ … is mistaken,” the attorneys wrote in a filing.