Hunter Biden’s criminal conviction is good for nobody politically
Excerpt
archived 12 Jun 2024 16:14:54 UTC
Last year almost 16m guns were sold in the United States. According to a government survey, 16% of adults have used marijuana in the past month. People buying a gun must fill in a seven-page federal form. Question 21f asks: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana” (or any other illegal drug)? Almost certainly hundreds of thousands of people lie on the form, which is a felony. In a typical year, fewer than 300 are prosecuted.
This year Hunter Biden became one of them. On June 11th the president’s wayward son was convicted on all three charges against him, after a six-day trial. In October 2018 he bought a Colt revolver at a gun shop in Wilmington, Delaware. At the time he was, a jury decided, addicted to crack cocaine. In theory he could now be sentenced to as long as 25 years in prison.
Mr Biden’s lawyers argued that at the time he purchased the gun he was in fact clean of crack, having spent August in rehab. To knock that argument down prosecutors called on witnesses including Kathleen Buhle, his ex-wife; Hallie Biden, the widow of his dead brother Beau, with whom Hunter had a relationship after his brother died; and Zoe Kestan, an ex-girlfriend who at the time she met the president’s son was 24 years old and working as a stripper. Their testimony, together with reams of evidence in the form of text messages, photos, videos and Mr Biden’s own memoir, convinced the jury that around the time Mr Biden bought the gun, he had also been trying to buy crack.
The trial was revealing—but not politically. Instead it showed the horror show that Mr Biden’s life became. A few details were darkly amusing. When he met Ms Kestan in a club in New York the president’s son apparently played a song by Fleet Foxes, an indie band from Seattle, an unusual choice for a lap dance. Most were simply dark. Ms Buhle testified that she developed a habit of cleaning out her husband’s car so that their daughters would not find drugs in it. Ms Biden told the court how she too used crack cocaine in the wake of Beau’s death from brain cancer.
Nobody is pleased with the result. For Joe Biden it is a crushing personal blow. During the trial he told abc News that he would not pardon his son. After the conviction he said he may be the president, “but I am also a Dad”. He praised Hunter for finally getting clean, and the two were photographed hugging at a Delaware airfield.
Republicans were remarkably quiet. Matt Gaetz, a brash Floridian congressman, called the conviction “kinda dumb”. Donald Trump’s campaign called it a “distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family”. That is, the unfounded idea that the president was wrapped up with his son’s business affairs. The campaign had apparently been hoping for an acquittal, so as to strengthen the idea that the justice system which convicted their candidate of 34 felonies last month is corrupt.
The conviction is not the end of Hunter’s criminal saga. In September he will go on trial in California on charges of tax evasion. That is more fertile terrain for Republicans, since the alleged unpaid taxes were on income that Hunter appears to have made trading on his father’s name (though nothing seems to implicate the president). For now, however, there is only one positive. The law has been upheld. ■
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