The picture of criminal behavior and a dissolute lifestyle was painted in sometimes painfully frank testimony in a Delaware court room last week and would have been difficult to hear for the family of any defendant.
But Hunter Biden, the man in the dock in Wilmington, is no ordinary plaintiff; he is the son of the president of the United States.
Biden Jr, 54, went on trial last Monday facing three federal charges relating to the illegal purchase and ownership of a gun while in the grip of longstanding drug addiction.
All week long, the proceedings put the personal conduct of the eldest surviving presidential scion under a microscope.
A jury in his home town heard details of his previous addiction to crack cocaine and how, in 2018 – with his father preparing for a run for the presidency – he bought a handgun by allegedly lying to a registered firearms dealer about his drug use. He then desperately tried to retrieve it from a garbage bin where his then lover, the widow of Joe Biden’s other son, Beau, who died in 2015, had dumped it in panic.
The trial will continue next week, when Hunter’s lawyer Abbe Lowell will make his defence. Yet already, the details of a president’s son gone astray should be manna in an election year for Republicans, who focused for years on Hunter Biden’s business interests and alleged wrongdoing in an effort to politically discredit his father.
Instead, the trial has presented Republicans with an awkward dilemma.
The fact that it is taking place at all undermines the now dominant narrative – dictated by Donald Trump and parroted in unison by his staunchest Republican supporters – of a Department of Justice weaponised by the Biden administration to pursue his political opponents, Trump chief among them.
Trump, the former president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, amplified the claim after his recent conviction on 34 charges of falsifying documents to hide paying hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actor, to help him win the 2016 presidential election.
Yet Trump’s conviction was the result of a New York state prosecuted by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who does not work under the justice department – while Hunter Biden’s is a federal prosecution brought by the department that is formally part of his father’s administration.
“The fact that the DoJ is pursuing Hunter Biden shows you that the Trump argument of a weaponised Department of Justice is a raging lie,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump former Republicans.
“It makes their base feel happy or excited, but it doesn’t move anybody else [with] the idea of Joe Biden being this criminal mastermind who was protecting his son. It just doesn’t hold up because Joe Biden says, ‘I love my child, but I’m not going to interfere with the case because it’s inappropriate.’”
Joe Biden, who was in France marking the anniversary of the D-day landings, confirmed this week that he would not pardon Hunter if he is convicted. If found guilty, he faces up to 25 years in jail, although such a sentence is highly unlikely for a non-violent first offender.
If the president’s no-pardon vow highlighted one awkward fit for Republicans trying to project Trump’s imagery of “crooked Joe” and “the Biden crime family”, another was presented by the fact that the main accusation against Hunter concerns breaching gun laws, which the GOP favours keeping as loose as possible, contrasting with Democrats’ pleas for tighter controls.
As he stood trial for transgressing federal gun background regulations, the Republican-led House of Representative this week narrowly passed a measure that would exempt military veterans who had been reported to the FBI over mental health concerns from being on the register for such checks.
Larry Jacobs, a professor of politics at the University of Minnesota, said the contradiction exposed an irrationality at the heart of the Republican argument.
“This is a story that contradicts a central political agenda point for the Republicans – namely, that guns ought to be more readily available,” he said.
“And here Hunter Biden is getting a gun and he’s being prosecuted for it. Rather than the right standing up and saying, this is false prosecution, it shows the overzealousness of the justice system, they’re so locked into a kind of Biden hate that they can’t think straight.”
Far from focusing on the case’s merits, segments of the Trump-cheering media have contrived to put a sinister gloss on the public support Joe Biden and his wife, Jill – who attended the trial for several days this week – have given Hunter.
When a photo circulated of the president and Hunter on a bike ride last weekend, Greg Gutfeld, a Fox News host, speculated that Joe Biden was subliminally warning jurors.
“That photo is a message. It’s Delaware for: remember, jurors, I’m the president, and I can always call the IRS,” Gutfield told viewers.
Fox’s legal analyst, Jeanine Pirro, accused Jill Biden of “using a mob tactic” by appearing in court, saying it was meant to intimidate the jury, according to Media Matters for America, a monitoring group that has compiled a list of conservative media soundbites on the trial. It showed a trend of commentators trying to depict Joe and Jill Biden as subtly interfering in the proceedings.
Some GOP politicians have picked up that theme. Ted Cruz, the rightwing Republican senator for Texas, suggested on his podcast that the president had engaged in “witness tampering” by recently visiting the home of Hallie Biden, Beau’s widow, who last week testified as a witness for the prosecution.
Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, said the sniping was aimed at preparing for a possible acquittal. “Therefore they sort of create some sort of explanation that fits in with their broader narrative,” said Gertz. The narrative, he said, depicted a justice system that punished Republicans while letting Democrats off scot-free.
While early polling evidence shows that Trump’s recent conviction may have handed a marginal but potentially vital advantage to Joe Biden – particularly among non-aligned independent voters – there is little to suggest that a Hunter Biden conviction would work in the opposite direction.
“It doesn’t seem to be connecting at all,” said John Zogby, a veteran pollster and historian. “As far as independents are concerned, I just don’t know that you hear any real buzz about Hunter.
“Another element here is that it is the president’s son, as opposed to the president himself, that’s on trial. And having taught history for almost a quarter of century. I’m not aware of any instance where a difficult child or a difficult sibling or a difficult wife actually hurt any president [at the polls].”
