(Headline USA) Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, claimed in a Delaware court Friday that a gun store employee had helped him fill out a form that he is accused of lying on in a felony charge.
The filing suggested that the brother of the former Delaware attorney general and son of its longtime U.S. senator was unaware of the state’s laws prohibiting drug addicts from possessing firearms.
Despite the effort to deflect culpability, some quickly noticed glaring irregularities with the forms provided in the new court filings, including the fact that the employee used three different-colored pens.
The clerk who sold Hunter Biden a gun used three different pens to fill out the gun form. First black, selling him a gun w/o showing proper ID.https://t.co/XRaXo5o44G pic.twitter.com/PmPAnC9ngZ
— emptywheel (synonym: dissect) (@emptywheel) May 24, 2024
U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika presided over what was expected to be the last hearing before trial expected to begin with jury selection on June 3.
President Joe Biden’s son didn’t speak to reporters as he followed his lawyers into the Wilmington courthouse.
He’s charged with lying about his drug use in October 2018 on a form to buy a gun that he kept for about 11 days in Delaware. He has acknowledged an addiction to crack cocaine during that period.
His lawyers have claimed he didn’t break the law and insisted the case is politically motivated.
The two sides have been arguing in court documents about evidence in the case, including the contents of his abandoned laptop that were recovered from a hard drive at a Delaware repair shop. Much of the contents have since been made public by the opposition-research group Marco Polo at BidenLaptopMedia.com.
Defense attorneys have questioned the authenticity of the laptop’s data in court documents, but prosecutors say that there’s no evidence the data has been compromised and that a drawn-out fight over it at trial would be a waste of time.
After media and deep state propagandists initially attempted to claim it was Russian disinformation, it has since been forensically analyzed by experts and intelligence officials, both of whom confirm the authenticity of the contents. Former Biden business associates have also verified the authenticity.
Prosecutors also plan to show jurors portions of Hunter Biden’s 2021 memoir Beautiful Things, in which he detailed his struggle with alcoholism and drug abuse following the 2015 death of his older brother, Beau, of brain cancer at age 46.
Hunter is also facing federal tax charges in Los Angeles and is set for trial in that case in September.
He’s accused of failing to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes over four years while living an “extravagant lifestyle” during a period in which he has acknowledged struggling with addiction. The back taxes have since been paid.
His lawyers have pushed unsuccessfully in both cases to have them dismissed. They have argued, among other things, that prosecutors bowed to political pressure to indict him after a plea agreement hit the skids in court and was publicly pilloried by Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, as a “sweetheart deal.”
Federal investigators slow-walked the case for years despite clear and compelling evidence, including the laptop, claiming that the the bureaucracy was hindering them from acting further. It was not until several whistleblowers testified before Congress that U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who was leading the probe, suddenly faced pressure to act as Biden officials were slammed for two-tiered justice.
The long-running federal investigation into the president’s son had looked ready to wrap up with a plea deal last year, but the agreement imploded after Noreika raised questions about it. Hunter Biden was subsequently indicted.
Under the deal, he would have gotten two years of probation after pleading guilty to misdemeanor tax charges. He also would have avoided prosecution on the gun charge if he stayed out of trouble.
Trump, who is running to unseat the Democratic president, faces his own legal problems. He is charged in four criminal cases which have all been slammed as spurious lawfare attacks.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
