After a years-long investigation by a Justice Department prosecutor appointed under former President Donald Trump, a Delaware jury found Hunter Biden guilty on three counts related to his purchase of a handgun at a gun store in Wilmington six years ago.
Prosecutors alleged that Hunter, President Joe Biden’s youngest and only surviving son, lied on an eight-page form he had to fill out to purchase the .38-caliber handgun. It is a federal crime to lie on the form known as ATF Form 4473. Prosecutors said he did so while checking a box stating he did not use illegal drugs.
They also alleged that he violated a separate criminal statute by making false statements regarding his drug-addict status during the transaction with a licensed gun dealer and by possessing the gun while addicted to drugs.
Were the accusations serious? Yes. Any gun-related criminal charge is usually serious, even in a country with relatively lax laws regarding the possession and acquisition of firearms.
The week-long hearing, held at a federal courthouse not far from where President Biden’s reelection campaign is taking place, marked a low point for Hunter. By his own admission, the Yale graduate-turned-lawyer-turned-businessman has struggled with drug and alcohol addiction for decades.
And it’s the latest chapter in a long-running saga in which Republicans hope Hunter’s troubles will end with him helping oust his father from the White House and reinstate Donald Trump despite Trump’s status as a convicted felon.
Since 2019, when Joe Biden would run against Trump in the 2020 election, Hunter Biden has been a cudgel that the GOP has tried to use against his father. It all started with the now-famous phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; During that call, Trump pressured Zelensky to announce an investigation into both the elder Biden and his son.
He never got what he tried to extort from Zelensky. But that didn’t stop Trump from repeatedly and brazenly lying about Hunter’s business work abroad and accusing Joe Biden of profiting from it; yet there was no evidence that such a thing had occurred.
Hunter’s status as an object of right-wing hate was further cemented in October 2020. New York Post He received and reported emails from a copy of a laptop hard drive that allegedly belonged to him. The laptop was allegedly abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware run by a Trump supporter who provided copies of the disk to various high-profile pro-Trump figures, including disgraced former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
This sparked a dramatic outcry and backlash. Twitter’s management at the time accidentally (in their own words) – and briefly – to mail Because they believed the email in question had been stolen as part of a hack-and-dump operation similar to the one Russian intelligence services carried out against prominent Democrats four years ago. Such a hack-and-leak operation had “all the hallmarks” of a Russian disinformation operation, but there was no evidence that it was, said an open letter written by more than 50 former intelligence experts. It later became an article of faith among Trump supporters that one of the only reasons Trump lost the election — because any of his supporters initially believed he had lost — was because voters were unaware of the election. The president’s faulty son’s faulty computer.
Targeting Hunter ever since rigidity For every Republican hoping to make his bones as a warrior for Trump’s cause.
A whole cottage industry has been built around the Hunter for this purpose. One of Trump’s former administration aides has spent much of the last four years streaming increasingly bizarre streams of content from a copy of a hard drive he acquired. Republicans in Congress have also spent much of the last two years poring over Hunter’s stolen data, hoping to find a way to credibly indict his father. anything That would justify impeaching him to make Democrats pay back for two well-deserved lawsuits filed against Trump during his tumultuous four years in the White House.
The only real effect of the GOP-led investigation’s focus on Hunter was to pressure a Trump-appointed judge to rescind the plea deal he reached to avoid that trial; because it made the government say “We had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, even though there is little evidence of violations of that law outside the fiery swamps.”
After the deal fell apart, the Trump-appointed prosecutor pursuing Hunter was reassigned to a special counsel role, allowing him to file a second indictment against her for alleged tax code violations in California.
But congressional investigations into President Biden have not allowed Hunter to bear the brunt of the Republican vendetta against him, as he is being tried on charges that legal experts say could never be removed from a larger case involving much more. serious crimes.
The GOP will try to use the outcome of this case to smear Joe with Hunter’s bad actions, just like Donald Trump tried to do during the second debate four years ago.
It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.
Hunter Biden may have made a mistake. But it’s not on the ballot this fall. And Americans know this.