by Following an investigation by a Justice Department prosecutor appointed under former president Donald Trump, a Delaware jury found Hunter Biden guilty of three separate criminal charges related to the purchase of a revolver from a gun shop in Wilmington. a year ago.
Prosecutors allege that Hunter, the youngest and only surviving son of President Joe Biden, lied on an eight-page form he had to fill out to buy the .38-caliber revolver. Lying on the form, known as ATF Form 4473, is a federal crime, which prosecutors said he did when he checked a box indicating he was not a user of illegal drugs.
They also separately alleged that he violated a separate criminal law by making a false statement regarding his status as a drug addict during the transaction to the licensed gun dealer, and by possessing the gun while addicted to drugs.
Were the charges serious? Yes. Any criminal charge related to guns is generally serious, even in a country with fairly strict laws governing the possession and acquisition of firearms.
The week-long trial, held in a federal courthouse not far from where President Biden’s re-election campaign is based, was a low point for Hunter. The Yale-educated lawyer-turned-businessman has, by his own admission, struggled with drug and alcohol addiction for years.
And it’s just the latest chapter in a long-running saga that Republicans hope will end with Hunter’s troubles helping to oust his father from the White House and accompanying him in Donald Trump’s restoration — despite Trump’s status as a convicted traitor.
Since 2019, when it was clear that Joe Biden would be a candidate in the 2020 election against Trump, Hunter Biden has been a pulse that the GOP wants to throw against his father. It began with the now-famous phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump pressured Zelensky to announce investigations into both the elder Biden and his son.
He did not get what he tried to extort from Zelensky. But that didn’t stop Trump from repeatedly lying about Hunter’s business work overseas and accusing Joe Biden of profiting from it, despite there being no evidence that anything of the sort happened that.
Hunter’s status as a right-wing hate object was further cemented in October 2020, after the New York Post received and reported on e-mails from a copy of a hard drive said to be from a laptop belonging to him. The laptop was allegedly abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop run by a Trump supporter who supplied copies of the drive to various high-profile pro-Trump figures, including disgraced former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.
This led to a dramatic backlash and collapse. The management at that time at Twitter mistakenly (in their words) — and summarily — removed a limited number of the Post story because they believed the email in question was stolen as part of a hack-and-dump operation similar to what Russian intelligence services had done to prominent Democrats four years earlier. An open letter from more than 50 veteran intelligence experts said such a hack-and-leak operation had the “hallmarks” of a Russian disinformation operation, although there is no proof that it did. It then became an article of faith among the Trumpian faithful that one of the only reasons Trump lost the election — as much as any of his supporters believed he had at first — was that the voters were not informed about the story. erratic son of the President’s computer.
Since then, the focus has been on Hunter strictly speaking for any Republican who hopes to make his bones as a fighter for Trump’s cause.
To that end, an entire cottage industry has been built around Hunter. One former Trump administration aide has spent much of the past four years publishing increasingly strange streams of content from a copy of a hard drive he found. Republicans in Congress have spent much of the past two years mining through Hunter’s stolen data in hopes of finding any way to impeach his father. anything which would justify impeaching him to repay the Democrats for the two justice cases they brought against Trump during his four tumultuous years in the White House.
The only real effect the GOP-led probe’s focus on Hunter has had is pressuring a Trump-appointed judge to throw out a plea deal he reached to avoid this trial because it would obstruct the government to try charges related to him. d violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act — despite little evidence outside the fever swamps that that law was ever violated.
When the deal fell apart, the Trump-appointed prosecutor pursuing Hunter was appointed to the role of special counsel, allowing him to bring a second set of charges against him for tax law violations in California.
But congressional investigations into President Biden have not touched him, leaving Hunter at the helm of the Republican vendetta against him, after he was tried on charges that legal experts say would not be brought outside of a larger case involving with much more. serious crimes.
The GOP will try to use the outcome of this trial to counter Hunter’s claims, just as Donald Trump did during the second debate four years ago.
It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.
Hunter Biden may have done it wrong. But it’s not on the ballot this fall. And Americans know that.
