WILMINGTON, Del. — Guilty, guilty, guilty.
Hunter Biden became the first child of a sitting president to be convicted of a crime Tuesday after a federal jury found him guilty on three counts related to lying about his drug use in order to buy a gun.
The panel of six men and six women deliberated for three hours across two days before convicting the 54-year-old of making a false statement in the purchase of a firearm, making a false statement related to information required to be kept by a federally licensed firearms dealer, and possession of a firearm by an unlawful user of or addict to a controlled substance.
The first son stared at the jury and made no visible reaction as the foreperson read the verdict. Hunter’s wife Melissa sat in the gallery behind him, next to her husband’s “sugar brother,” attorney Kevin Morris.
First lady Jill Biden, who was present at every day of the trial except one, was caught out by the speed with which the verdict was reached — entering the courtroom two minutes after it had been read.
A few moments later, Hunter left the federal courthouse in Wilmington holding hands with wife Melissa Cohen Biden. He touched his stepmother Jill on the shoulder before getting in a black SUV guarded by Secret Service agents — and ignored the nearby pack of reporters.
Prosecutors from special counsel David Weiss’ office had argued President Biden’s son knowingly fibbed on a gun application form that he did not use controlled substances before walking out of a Wilmington shop with a Colt Cobra .38-caliber revolver on Oct. 12, 2018.
In fact, Hunter Biden was hooked on crack cocaine at the time, a fact he acknowledged in his own 2021 memoir — which prosecutors used as evidence against him.
The first son faces up to 25 years behind bars — though a lighter sentence is much more likely since he has no prior convictions.
The verdict is not the end of Hunter Biden’s legal trouble.
He’s scheduled to face a case in Los Angeles federal court beginning Sept. 5 for allegedly evading $1.4 million in federal income tax for the years 2016 through 2019.
The government used witness testimony, Hunter’s own communications, data taken from his infamous laptop and excerpts from his book “Beautiful Things” to prove that he was using crack around the time he bought the firearm.
Judge Maryellen Noreika had ruled before trial that prosecutors didn’t have to prove that Hunter was high the day he purchased the weapon.
Jurors heard a plethora of excerpts from the audiobook of Hunter’s memoir — narrated by the first son himself — describing his struggle with addiction and how he had a “superpower of finding crack cocaine anytime, anywhere.”
The jury also saw copious messages in which Hunter appeared to be pursuing drug deals and talked about being high or how he was using — including texting his dealer in the spring of 2018 asking: “Can you get baby powder, the real soft stuff.”
Jurors heard from witnesses including the Biden scion’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; his ex-girlfriend, Zoe Kestan; and from his sister-in-law-turned-lover Hallie Biden, who was married to Hunter’s brother Beau until he died of brain cancer in 2015.
Buhle testified about discovering Hunter used crack the same year as Beau’s death, when she found her then-husband’s pipe on the porch of their Washington, DC home. She said that when he used he was “not himself,” and was “angry [and] short-tempered.”
Kestan told jurors about dating Hunter for roughly nine months in 2018, a wild period during which she got a front row seat to him smoking crack “every 20 minutes or so.”
Hallie testified about finding the gun inside Hunter’s Ford Raptor pickup on Oct. 23, 2018 — 11 days after he bought it — and throwing the weapon away in a panic at a Wilmington grocery store.
Moments later, Hallie recounted, Hunter flew into a rage upon learning she got rid of the .38 and ordered her to retrieve it.
But when she returned to the store roughly 30 minutes later, the gun was no longer there. (It was later found and turned in by an elderly man who had been searching the trash for recyclables.)
Hunter’s defense team, led by attorney Abbe Lowell, told jurors that their client didn’t knowingly lie on the gun application form but rather argued he was in a “deep state of denial” about his drug dependency.
Lowell further described Gordon Cleveland, the salesman at the StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply, as a “whale hunter” who pushed Hunter into buying the weapon.
The defense also tried to poke holes in the prosecution’s timeline of Hunter’s addiction in an attempt to show he hadn’t fallen off of the drug wagon, but was instead struggling with alcoholism.
Hunter had pleaded not guilty to all charges in the case, although in June 2023 he was slated to take a guilty plea — only for the deal with prosecutors to blow up in court after Hunter’s team discovered he wouldn’t receive blanket immunity from possible future charges.
