Jury Selection in Hunter Biden’s Gun Case Begins (2024)

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Family Turns Out to Support Hunter Biden as Jury Is Selected in Gun Trial

The opening hours of jury selection in Mr. Biden’s trial on charges that he lied about his drug use in applying to buy a handgun in 2018 were, as expected, a high-stakes political spectacle — with a throng of reporters crowding the courthouse while TV crews did live shots, nearly nonstop, after sunrise.

But the presence of Mr. Biden’s family and friends, including his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, his half sister, Ashley Biden, and his close friend Kevin Morris, served as a reminder that the trial was also a profound personal crisis for a family that has had more than its share of travails — in the middle of the most unforgiving presidential campaign in recent memory.

“Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today,” President Biden said in a statement issued after the proceeding began.

“Hunter’s resilience in the face of adversity and the strength he has brought to his recovery are inspiring to us,” added Mr. Biden, who spent Sunday night with his son at the family house in Wilmington. “Our family has been through a lot together, and Jill and I are going to continue to be there for Hunter and our family with our love and support.”

But the trial is also expected to air less flattering details of Hunter Biden’s family life.

The special counsel overseeing the prosecution, David C. Weiss, has signaled that he will call Hunter Biden’s former wife, Kathleen Buhle, who is locked in a long legal battle with him over unpaid alimony, according to prosecutors.

A top deputy to Mr. Weiss, Leo P. Wise, has filed court papers indicating that he also plans to call Hallie Biden, the widow of Hunter Biden’s brother, Beau. Ms. Biden was dating Hunter Biden when he bought the handgun at issue in the case.

By late afternoon, Judge Maryellen Noreika had seated the jury: four Black men, three Black women, three white women and two white men.

The selection process also provided an unexpected glimpse into the insular cultural and political microclimate of Delaware, one of the country’s smallest states, where encounters with the first family were so commonplace as to be almost unremarkable.

One potential juror, a former police officer, matter-of-factly told the judge that he had once worked with Dr. Biden at a local college. Just when it seemed he had passed muster, he let slip that he had supported Ferris Wharton, who unsuccessfully challenged Beau Biden for Delaware attorney general in 2006.

“Next juror, please,” Judge Noreika said, with a slight grin.

Last September, a federal grand jury charged Hunter Biden with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the federal firearms application used to screen applicants and possessing an illegally obtained gun for 11 days, from Oct. 12 to Oct. 23, 2018.

If convicted, Mr. Biden could face up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. But nonviolent first-time offenders who have not been accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely get serious prison time for the charges.

Legal experts say it is more likely a sentence could include a central element of the original plea deal — mandatory enrollment in a firearms diversion program intended to reduce incarceration rates for the least serious gun crimes.

Mr. Biden, his legal team and his family are hoping to turn the court’s attention away from his actions during a long period of out-of-control drug and alcohol use to the more universal experiences of families affected by relatives with substance abuse problems, and Mr. Biden’s recent success in staying sober.

Many of the would-be jurors spoke emotionally about their own families’ struggles, with one man breaking down in tears when he talked about a brother-in-law who had been addicted to drugs.

Another juror candidate shared a relative’s history with substance abuse and how it had made her more sympathetic with other people experiencing similar problems.

“It’s a disease, and I don’t look down on that,” she said as Hunter and Jill Biden craned forward in their seats to listen intently. “People have problems.”

Mr. Biden has been sober for years and has written about his difficulty with crack addiction and alcohol dependency in his memoir, which is likely to be used as evidence. Over the past year, the president’s son has submitted to drug testing and passed, according to his lawyer Abbe Lowell.

The gun charges are related to whether Mr. Biden had lied on a standard form issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives when he bought a .38-caliber pistol. Prosecutors said he falsely claimed he was not taking drugs at the time. Mr. Biden had the gun for under two weeks, he has said, before Hallie Biden tossed it in a dumpster, fearful that he would use it to harm himself.

It is relatively rare for such gun charges to be brought against a first-time, nonviolent offender like Mr. Biden, unless it is being used as leverage for a confession on other crimes, such as drug trafficking, current and former prosecutors have said.

The gun trial is only the first of two Mr. Biden is facing.

Last month, the federal judge in Los Angeles who is presiding over his tax case agreed to push the start of that trial from later this month to Sept. 5, giving Mr. Biden’s lawyers time to prepare.

While the move came as a relief to the president’s son, it thrusts into the homestretch of the campaign season a trial that is likely to highlight Hunter’s Biden’s efforts to leverage his family’s name into profit.

Mr. Biden has pleaded not guilty to charges of evading a tax assessment, failing to file and pay taxes, and filing a false or fraudulent tax return.

Judge Noreika, an appointee of President Donald J. Trump, tightly controlled her courtroom on Monday, much as she did during the hearing that ended Mr. Biden’s plea agreement last July, and showed every indication of wanting to move things along as quickly as possible.

She swatted down Mr. Lowell’s attempt to disqualify two potential jurors — hours after delivering two small but significant setbacks to Mr. Biden’s defense.

She has also ruled that Mr. Biden’s lawyers cannot refer to the fact that the local authorities declined to prosecute him when the gun was recovered. She also blocked Mr. Weiss from making any reference to the tax case when presenting evidence in Delaware.

For his part, Mr. Biden sat through the jury selection sternly, wearing reading glasses and taking notes.

But when the judge called for the midday break, he sprang from his seat like a student hearing the end-of-day bell, flashed a grin and began fist-bumping and hugging the people who had shown up to support him.

Zach Montague contributed reporting.

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Hunter Biden will also face trial in September, over a scheme to evade federal taxes on millions in income from foreign businesses.

The charges, filed in California in December, came five months after he appeared to be on the verge of a plea deal that would have avoided jail time and potentially granted him broad immunity from future prosecution stemming from his business dealings. But the agreement collapsed, and in September, he was indicted in Delaware on three charges stemming from his illegal purchase of a handgun in 2018, a period when he used drugs heavily and was prohibited from owning a firearm.

The tax charges have always been the more serious element of the inquiry by the special counsel, David C. Weiss, who began investigating the president’s son five years ago as the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Delaware. Mr. Weiss was retained when President Biden took office in 2021.

Mr. Biden “engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019,” Mr. Weiss wrote.

“Between 2016 and Oct. 15, 2020, the defendant spent this money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes,” he added.

If convicted, he could face a maximum of 17 years in prison, Justice Department officials said.

The charges, while serious, were far less explosive than ones pushed by former President Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans, who have been angry with the department for failing to find wider criminal wrongdoing by the president’s son and family.

Many of the facts laid out in the indictment were already widely known, and the litany of Mr. Biden’s actions tracks closely with a narrative he drafted with prosecutors in the plea deal that collapsed over the summer.

Prosecutors said that he “subverted the payroll and tax withholding process of his own company,” Owasco PC, by withdrawing millions from the coffers that he used to subsidize “an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills.” They also accused him of taking false business deductions.

Mr. Weiss called out Mr. Biden for failing to pay child support and his reliance on associates, including the Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, to pay his way. Prosecutors included a chart that tracked the cash he siphoned from Owasco’s coffers — $1.6 million in A.T.M. withdrawals, $683,212 for “payments — various women,” nearly $400,000 for clothing and accessories, and around $750,000 for restaurants, health and beauty products, groceries, and other retail purchases.

Throughout the document, Mr. Weiss presented an unflattering split-screen of Mr. Biden, scooping up millions in income and gifts from friends while stubbornly refusing to pay his taxes. That pattern even persisted into 2020, after he had borrowed money to pay off his tax liabilities from the previous few years, prosecutors wrote.

“Defendant spent $17,500 each month, totaling approximately $200,000 from January through Oct. 15, 2020, on a lavish house on a canal in Venice Beach, Calif.,” they wrote, adding that “the I.R.S. stood as the last creditor to be paid.”

In a statement, Abbe Lowell, Mr. Biden’s lawyer, said Mr. Weiss had “bowed to Republican pressure” and accused him of reneging on their previous agreement.

“If Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought,” he said.

Luke Broadwater and Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.

House Republicans, flailing in their drive to impeach Biden, look to related targets.

Instead, top G.O.P. lawmakers have begun strategizing about making criminal referrals against Mr. Biden, members of his family and his associates, which would essentially mean sending letters to the Justice Department urging prosecutors to investigate specific crimes they believe — but can’t prove — may have been committed.

The move would be largely symbolic, but it would allow Republicans in Congress to put an end to their impeachment inquiry without risking a losing vote on the House floor. It has the added appeal for the G.O.P. of aligning with former President Donald J. Trump’s vow to prosecute Mr. Biden if he wins the election.

And making criminal referrals would avoid a repeat of the humiliating process that the House Republicans, who have a tiny and dwindling majority, went through in February, with the impeachment of Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary. After initially falling short of the votes needed to impeach, Republicans barely succeeded on the second try, only to watch as the Democratic-controlled Senate quickly dismissed the charges against Mr. Mayorkas in April without a trial.

The G.O.P. drive to impeach Mr. Biden, mostly by attempting to tie him to the financial dealings of his son Hunter Biden, has met a series of setbacks. A three-week chaotic speaker fight in the fall derailed committees’ work. Five House Republicans quit or left Congress, weakening the G.O.P. majority, and the investigation was never able to produce the kind of damning evidence needed to convince moderate members to vote for impeachment.

Witnesses repeatedly undercut Republicans’ claims. Most debilitating was the indictment of a key informant who was accused of making up lies about the Bidens.

Republicans say they are not finished with their investigation, and could still change course and decide to hold an impeachment vote. They have been demanding audio recordings of President Biden that were part of the special-counsel investigation by Robert K. Hur into his handling of classified documents.

Last month, two House committees voted along party lines to recommend holding Merrick B. Garland, the attorney general, in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with their subpoenas demanding the recordings. Those resolutions would have to go to the full House for a vote. Approval is not certain, given Republicans’ narrow majority and intraparty divisions, congressional aides said.

Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and chairman of the Oversight Committee, has repeatedly suggested that issuing criminal referrals could mark the end of the impeachment inquiry. In March, he sent a fund-raising email in which he requested donations while informing donors he was “preparing criminal referrals as the culmination of my investigation.”

Criminal referrals would be a politically easier move for House Republicans than impeachment. They do not require a vote of Congress or even carry any legal weight. Mr. Comer could simply draft a letter laying out the allegations.

The Democratic-run special House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol made major headlines in the last Congress with its criminal referrals of Mr. Trump. (He was later charged by the Justice Department with crimes related to the plan to overturn the 2020 election. A trial date is not set.)

Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel on the weaponization of government, said Republicans were merely trying to salvage a flailing investigation.

Even some Republicans said a referral against Mr. Biden might not make sense, citing the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

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Hunter Biden’s family members joined him in court after a weekend together.

Hunter Biden and his legal team arrived at the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building around 8:10 a.m. between two members of his family who came to observe the proceedings. His half sister, Ashley Biden, and her mother, Jill Biden, who turned 73 on Monday, arrived separately.

Ahead of the trial, the Biden family pulled together this weekend, sharing time in their home state, with Hunter and his father biking and attending church on Saturday.

The trial centers on accusations that the president’s son lied on a federal form when he purchased a gun in 2018, at a time when he was struggling with addiction. Hunter Biden’s lawyers have said he misunderstood the questionnaire he filled out, and that the charges are overstated.

Hunter Biden and his financial supporters are squeezed for money as his trial begins.

With Mr. Biden’s trial on gun charges beginning in Delaware, Mr. Morris has said he might need to sell some real estate holdings or other assets if others do not step up to fill the gap, according to people familiar with the situation. He hopes to pressure the president’s advisers into helping find new donors, people close to the situation said.

Financial troubles are nothing new for President Biden’s son, and his current woes are unlikely to prevent him from mounting a sturdy defense. But it adds a layer of stress and uncertainty, and could limit his ability to hire expert witnesses or other specialists in the gun case or in his trial on tax charges in California in September, they said.

Mr. Morris has lent Mr. Biden money to cover an array of expenses he incurred in recent years, including his multimillion-dollar back taxes bill and legal expenses stemming from the government’s long-running investigation. Mr. Morris has also helped Mr. Biden on other expenses, including rent on expensive houses in Malibu and payments for a luxury car.

Some of Hunter Biden’s debts to Mr. Morris were documented by four promissory notes, totaling $5.3 million, that were reviewed by The New York Times. A fifth promissory note, detailed in a letter from Mr. Morris’s lawyers, brings the total to $6.5 million.

Mr. Biden agreed to pay 5 percent interest, with no payments due before October 2025.

But Mr. Morris has expressed growing concerns about how much longer he can soldier on, in hopes of enlisting the assistance of President Biden’s personal lawyer Bob Bauer in raising money to help pay off Hunter Biden’s debts. Mr. Bauer, the former White House counsel, handles many of the president’s most sensitive legal and political affairs.

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Leading up to the trial, President Biden has chosen to pull his son closer.

Father and son were spotted on a bicycle ride and at church on Saturday afternoon in Delaware. Earlier in the week, they were together to mark the anniversary of the death of Beau Biden, the president’s eldest son, who died of brain cancer on May 30, 2015.

Hunter Biden has fielded questions from friends who have approached to ask him how he is doing. At a state dinner honoring Kenya in late May, the veteran Democratic operative Donna Brazile, who has known the Bidens since the 1980s, asked him how he was doing. He replied, “as best as possible,” she recalled.

The president’s refusal to distance himself from his son has led to some uncomfortable juxtapositions: Hunter Biden was dining yards away from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, whose Justice Department is overseeing the federal charges.

Ms. Brazile added that she was not surprised that the president would invite his son.

“This is a dad who loves his children, and that is part of who Joe Biden is,” she said. “This is a guy who wants to get his life back,” she added of Mr. Biden’s son, “and find a better life and a better way of living so he can take care of his family. That’s who Hunter is.”

“Hunter’s resilience in the face of adversity and the strength he has brought to his recovery are inspiring to us,” the statement continued. “A lot of families have loved ones who have overcome addiction and know what we mean. As the president, I don’t and won’t comment on pending federal cases, but as dad, I have boundless love for my son, confidence in him and respect for his strength.”

How common is a prosecution for the gun charges Hunter Biden faces?

Prosecutions for lying to a dealer are relatively rare, averaging fewer than 300 per year. There were some 25 million to 30 million background checks performed annually around the time of Mr. Biden’s gun purchase, according to statistics obtained by The Washington Post.

Charges of illegal firearms possession are much more common. But they too are most often used as an add-on, to leverage plea deals or to ensure that a defendant is convicted on at least one charge if there are doubts that they will be convicted on an underlying charge, Mr. Fishwick and other former prosecutors said.

In May 2023, for example, when more than 20 people in Savannah received sentences from 10 months to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to illegal firearms possession, all of them had criminal records or were caught in the act of committing another crime.

When officials with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reviewed Hunter Biden’s gun application several years ago, they believed the case most likely would have been dropped if the target were a lesser-known person — because the gun had not been used in a crime and Mr. Biden had taken steps to get and stay sober, according to a former law enforcement official familiar with the situation.

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Rules banning electronics in the courtroom make speedy reporting on Hunter Biden’s trial tricky.

Reporters in the courtroom will be taking handwritten notes. They cannot bring any electronics into the building except whatever fits in a small lockable pouch provided by the U.S. Marshals — usually one or two cellphones. The bag allows reporters to keep their devices on site but not to use them.

To update their editors from the trial, reporters will have to leave the building to use their phones or laptops. They will not be allowed back inside the courtroom if they leave before a scheduled break.

Like at most courts, there will be an overflow room for journalists to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit monitors. Some federal buildings allow reporters to use their phones and computers from the overflow room, but that is not the case for Mr. Biden’s trial.

With very limited exceptions, reporters are not allowed to record the proceedings, even from the overflow room. To get the exact words used in the courtroom, journalists and the public alike have to purchase a transcript from the court reporter, who charges by the page. Rates depend on how quickly the transcript is needed and whether anyone else has already purchased it, ranging from 70 cents to $8 a page.

But every courthouse is different. That small pouch for the cellphones in Delaware seems like an indulgence compared to the restrictions at a courthouse handling one of former President Donald J. Trump’s cases.

At the Alto Lee Adams Sr. building in Fort Pierce, Fla., which is hosting Mr. Trump’s case regarding the mishandling of national security documents, reporters cannot bring in any electronics at all. (When I go there, I pack my electronics in a cooler that I keep in the trunk of my rental car so they don’t overheat.)

But reporters who covered Mr. Trump’s trial in Manhattan had it relatively easy: They were allowed to sit in the press area of the courtroom and use their laptops to take notes, write and send material to their editors. Still, they could not use their phones, even for texting.

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Confidential correspondence and interviews give a look inside the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal.

Six weeks later, the federal judge presiding over a hearing on the agreement would expose even deeper divisions and the deal imploded, prompting Mr. Weiss to seek appointment as special counsel with the freedom to expand the inquiry and bring new charges.

The deal’s collapse — chronicled in over 200 pages of confidential correspondence between Mr. Weiss’s office and Mr. Biden’s legal team, and interviews with those close to Mr. Biden, lawyers involved in the case and Justice Department officials — came after intense negotiations that started with the prospect that Mr. Biden would not be charged at all and now could end in two separate trials.

The Times found that earlier in 2023, Mr. Weiss appeared willing to forgo any prosecution of Mr. Biden at all, and his office came close to agreeing to end the investigation without requiring a guilty plea on any charges. But the correspondence reveals that his position, relayed through his staff, changed in the spring, around the time a pair of I.R.S. officials on the case accused the Justice Department of hamstringing the investigation. Mr. Weiss suddenly demanded that Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses.

The I.R.S. agents and their Republican allies say they believe the evidence they brought forward, at the precise time they did, played a role in influencing the outcome, a claim senior law enforcement officials dispute. While Mr. Biden’s legal team agrees that the I.R.S. agents affected the deal, his lawyers have contended to the Justice Department that by disclosing details about the investigation to Congress, they broke the law and should be prosecuted.

President Biden and his family spent the weekend at their home in Rehoboth Beach, Del. They traveled to Wilmington on Sunday night. The president is expected to leave for a fund-raiser in New York on Monday afternoon and head to Paris on Tuesday.

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Here are the gun charges Hunter Biden faces.

Just bringing the charges is out of the ordinary in some ways, former law enforcement officials say, and the legal basis of the prosecution is under constitutional challenge.

The indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Wilmington, Del., charged Mr. Biden with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail; making a false claim on the federal firearms application used to screen applicants, with a sentence of up to five years; and possession of an illegally obtained gun from Oct. 12-23, 2018, which carries a maximum of 10 years.

The charges stem from the purchase of a handgun by Mr. Biden at one of the low points of his troubled life. He had been addicted to crack cocaine, bouncing in and out of rehab, was divorced, using prostitutes and having money problems. The New York Times reported last year that Mr. Biden later recounted to friends going into the gun store on a whim and buying the .38 because he thought spending time at a shooting range would help him avoid using drugs.

In purchasing the gun, Mr. Biden had to fill out a form for a federal background check. In response to a question on the form about whether he was using drugs, Mr. Biden said he was not — an assertion that prosecutors concluded was false.

The first two charges against Mr. Biden are essentially the same — that he lied about his drug use to illegally obtain the weapon, and that he falsely claimed that he was not “addicted to any stimulant, narcotic drug, and any other controlled substance” on the federal form, known as a 4473.

The third charge, illegal possession of the gun while under the influence of drugs, stems from the time he had the weapon. Hallie Biden, his brother Beau’s widow — and his romantic partner at the time — eventually discovered the gun and threw it into a dumpster.

The section of federal law cited in the indictment, 18 U.S. Code § 922, is the main statute used to define who can and cannot possess a firearm. It bars drug users, people convicted of felonies whose punishment exceeds a one-year prison sentence, fugitives from justice, people judged to be “mentally defective,” and those receiving dishonorable discharges from the military.