WILMINGTON, Delaware — A jury found Hunter Biden guilty on Tuesday of all three charges he was facing related to a 2018 gun purchase, marking the first time in history the son of a sitting president has been criminally convicted.
His charges included lying on a federal form about his drug use to purchase a revolver, submitting a false statement into a federal record, and unlawfully possessing the firearm for 11 days.
He faces up to 25 years in prison, but as a first-time offender, his sentence is likely to be far less than that.
The week-long trial was a deeply personal rehashing of a dark period of drug and alcohol addiction for Biden, who has said he has been sober since mid-2019.
“Addiction is not a choice, but lying and buying a gun is a choice,” Derek Hines, a federal prosecutor, said in his opening statement.
The trial featured testimony from about a dozen witnesses, including his ex-wife and two ex-girlfriends who testified about his compulsive use of crack cocaine.
It included Biden’s own voice, in the form of the audiobook of his memoir Beautiful Things, in which he went into vivid detail about instances of drug use, such as “smoking crack every 15 minutes” in early 2018.
Other evidence included records, such as text messages and receipts, that were pulled from Biden’s infamous laptop and other iterations of his computer data. At one point during the trial, an FBI agent held up his silver MacBook Pro, which he had abandoned at a repair shop in 2018, revealing its physical appearance to the public for the first time. The agent said she had no evidence the machine had been tampered with, but she also said she did not specifically check for that. The occasion was momentous as Biden’s laptop has generated prolific and salacious headlines since its hard drive first fell into the hands of Republican operatives ahead of the 2020 election, and the first son has never confirmed its authenticity.
Biden’s defense was led by prominent white-collar attorney Abbe Lowell. Lowell repeatedly emphasized during the trial that his client could have felt he was being truthful on the gun form, saying addicts are often in a “deep state of denial” about their problem.
The form asked, “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, [controlled substances]?”
Lowell also noted countless times that the form was in the present tense and that prosecutors did not prove Biden used drugs during the time he purchased the gun and in the 11 days he possessed it.
In closing remarks, he said prosecutors used “conjecture and suspicion” based on Biden’s behavior from 2015 to 2019 in an attempt to persuade the jury that Biden was under the influence while armed with a dangerous weapon and ammunition.
“These are serious charges that would change Hunter’s life,” Lowell said, asserting that the charges involved too much reasonable doubt for a guilty verdict.
Hallie Biden, a key witness, testified that she found crack cocaine residue in Hunter Biden’s truck on Oct. 23, 2018, at the same time that she discovered the gun in his vehicle. She testified that she “panicked” and disposed of the gun and ammunition in a grocery store trash can. Prosecutors showed surveillance footage of her dropping the weapon in the waste bin. The revolver was later found by an elderly man named Edward Banner, who testified that he normally fishes for recyclables and was surprised to come upon the Colt Cobra 38 Special.
Hallie Biden is the widow of Hunter’s late brother Beau, and was in an on-and-off romantic relationship with Hunter Biden beginning in late 2015, after his brother died.
Hunter Biden wrote text messages to her in the two days after the gun purchase that indicated he was involved in drug deals at the time, including that he was “waiting for a dealer named Mookie” and “sleeping on a car smoking crack.”
Lowell said Hunter and Hallie Biden’s relationship was “intense” and under cross-examination, she said he lied to her sometimes about his whereabouts, undermining the credibility of the texts.
Another ex-girlfriend, Zoe Kestan, testified that she witnessed Hunter Biden doing crack cocaine in September and November 2018.
Judge Maryellen Noreika, who is presiding over the case, had ruled ahead of the trial that prosecutors did not need to prove Hunter Biden was on drugs at the exact time he filled out the form and owned the gun.
Rather, prosecutors needed only to prove that he was on drugs “recently enough” to indicate that he was “actively engaged in such conduct,” Leo Wise, another federal prosecutor, pointed out during his closing argument.
Hunter Biden’s charges were brought by special counsel David Weiss last September after Noreika, a Donald Trump appointee, took issue last summer with a plea deal the first son and Weiss had reached that would have allowed the first son to avoid the gun charges. She pointed to what she thought were unusual immunity provisions in it, resulting in the parties reaching an impasse on how to proceed.
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Weiss had been investigating Hunter Biden for five years for tax crimes and Foreign Agents Registration Act violations, and the gun charges were a byproduct of that probe.
Weiss also charged Hunter Biden in a separate case in California with nine tax crimes, and the first son is set to stand trial there in September.
This story is developing.