Hunter Biden has been dealt a major blow to his defense on the eve of his criminal trial on federal gun charges.
In a historic moment for America, the embattled son of the president is set to go on trial today on charges that he illegally bought a gun in 2018 while in the throes of drug addiction.
Jury selection will begin on Monday morning in federal court in Delaware, with the trial expected to last three to five days.
Biden has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
But Biden already looks set to face an uphill battle in the case following a series of 11th-hour rulings handed down by the judge on Sunday night.
In the rulings, US District Judge Maryellen Noreika blocked Biden’s legal team from presenting both a key piece of evidence and testimony from a key expert witness to jurors at his trial.
The president’s son’s defense had planned to show jurors two versions of the federal firearms form that had been filled out by Biden in 2018.
His attorneys argued that a second version had been “tampered with” by the gun store employees in 2021 – seeking to cast doubts on the credibility and “political bias” of the individuals expected to be called as prosecution witnesses.
The judge struck down the request to enter the second version as evidence and admonished the defense for pushing “conspiratorial” theories about the store workers.
The judge also sided with the prosecution in its bid to block expert testimony from Dr Elie Aoun, a drug addiction expert and clinical psychiatry professor at Columbia University who would have spoken to the “definition and understanding of a ‘user’ and an ‘addict’” and how addicts “view themselves”.
The president’s son was hit with three felony gun charges in Delaware in September over a gun purchase in October 2018 when he was in the grips of drug addiction.
Prosecutors allege that Biden unlawfully possessed a Colt Cobra 38SPL revolver for 11 days after he falsely claimed on a gun purchase form that he didn’t use drugs.
Under federal law, an unlawful drug user cannot legally possess a firearm.
The charges brought against Biden came after he reached a plea deal with the Justice Department last year before the terms of the agreement fell apart before a judge.
Under the terms of the deal, Biden had agreed to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors for failing to pay his taxes on time in 2017 and 2018. In exchange, prosecutors would not charge him with a gun possession violation.
But, in a dramatic moment in court, the judge refused to accept the scope of the plea deal, and the agreement – which was slammed as a “sweetheart deal” by critics of President Joe Biden – fell apart.
Special counsel David Weiss first brought the three gun-related charges in September, before hitting him with nine tax-related criminal charges three months later.
Biden’s attorneys have argued that the charges against the president’s son are the result of Republican pressure in a bid to damage his father’s reelection campaign.
This trial marks the first of two criminal trials the president’s son faces this summer with his tax fraud trial slated to begin on 20 June in California.
In that case, prosecutors allege that Biden made millions of dollars in income between the years 2016 and 2020 and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle of “exotic cars”, “drugs, escorts and girlfriends” – all the while skipping out on more than $1.4m in taxes.
According to the indictment, Hunter “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, from in or about January 2017 through in or about October 15, 2020, and to evade the assessment of taxes for tax year 2018 when he filed false returns in or about February 2020”.
Instead of paying his tax bills, the president’s son allegedly spent millions of dollars funding his “extravagant lifestyle”, including spending 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,” the indictment states.
The president’s son has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
In April, a federal judge threw out his bid to dismiss a string of tax charges, based on the argument that Weiss brought the charges due to pressure from the president’s Republican critics.
