Jury gets Hunter Biden case

The jury in the trial of Hunter Biden on Monday afternoon was given the case by a US District Court judge and finished for the day without a verdict.

The 12-member jury will return to court to continue deliberations Tuesday morning on whether President Joe Biden' s son is guilty of three charges related to his purchase of a gun in 2018.

Biden, 54, has pleaded not guilty to three felony charges that include lying about his drug addiction when he filled out a government screening document for the Colt Cobra revolver and illegally possessing the weapon.

The first two are tied to the gun purchase. Count three relates to the possession of the gun. It is also against federal law to possess a gun if you are abusing drugs.

Hunter Biden had the gun for 11 days in October 2018, before his girlfriend threw it in a dumpster because she was worried about his mental health, according to the indictment and texts made public in recent court filings.

The federal government case in Wilmington, Delaware, is the first criminal trial of a US president's child. If convicted on all counts, Biden could face as many as 25 years in prison and fines of up to $750,000, according to court filings.

However, defendants rarely get the maximum penalty, especially in cases involving nonviolent crimes and as an alleged first-time offender. Biden's punishment will be solely up to Judge Maryellen Noreika, who presided over the trial that started last week.

In the prosecution's rebuttal to the defense lawyer's closing argument earlier Monday, Derek Hines, the deputy to lead prosecutor Leo Wise, said, "If this trial didn't prove that Hunter Biden is a crack addict or unlawful user, then nobody is a crack addict or unlawful user," pointing directly at Hunter Biden while referring to Biden's decisions to buy a gun and use drugs.

"Choices have consequences, and that's why we're here," he said. "We wouldn't be here in this courtroom" if Hunter Biden only smoked crack, Hines said.

Lawyers for Biden rested their case Monday morning without calling him to testify.

Abbe Lowell, Biden's defense attorney, said in his closing argument that prosecutors failed to prove Biden was lying when he bought a gun and stated on a background check form that he wasn't a user of illegal drugs.

Lowell compared the government's case to the work of a magician who focuses attention on drug use from months or years before the gun purchase to create the illusion that Biden was a user of crack cocaine when he bought the gun.

Wise told the jury in his closing argument that the United States isn't required to prove drug use on a specific day. "There is no requirement for the United States to prove [drug] use in the month of October," he said.

Instead, the standard is that Biden was "actively engaged" in drugs around the time of the gun purchase, Wise said. "You can convict on those facts alone."

In a reference to first lady Jill Biden and other family members who have been sitting in the courtroom for much of the trial, Wise told the jury, "people sitting in the gallery are not evidence. You may recognize them from the news but respectfully, none of that matters. Your decision can only be made on evidence," he said.

Lowell has argued during the trial that there is no direct evidence that Biden was using drugs when he purchased the revolver, and he has established that no one saw Biden doing crack cocaine in the month he bought the gun.

He argued in his closing argument that the bar for prosecutors to prove Biden knowingly violated the law was extremely high.

"Knowingly," Lowell said, means that Hunter Biden would have had to have been "conscious and aware" of the law and how he was violating it. "With this very high burden, it's time to end this case," he said.

Lowell said that when Biden marked on the federal form that he wasn't an addict, he wasn't saying "what he believed to be false".

He told the jury that prosecutors hadn't proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Biden knew at the time he bought the gun that it was illegal.

"They spent hours, I mean literally hours, recounting Hunter Biden's terrible journey with alcohol and drug use," Lowell said, chiding prosecutors for reading excerpts from Biden's memoir.

But, Lowell said, prosecutors are "blurring Hunter's intentions at the time of the purchase with what he was "admitting after the fact" in his book. "Pay close attention" to the real timeline, Lowell told the jury.

In the summer of 2023, Special Counsel David Weiss negotiated a plea agreement that would have allowed Biden to scrape by with two misdemeanor tax charges while avoiding one gun violation, but with the caveat that he could still be charged for certain other offenses in the future.

But in July, Judge Noreika unexpectedly rejected certain provisions of the deal at a hearing. She gave Biden and Weiss an opportunity to address the immunity aspects of the deal, but the parties reached an impasse on how to proceed.

Later that year, Attorney General Merrick Garland made Weiss a special counsel, and Biden was hit with the gun charges in Delaware and then nine tax charges in California.

Agencies contributed to this story.