Special prosecutor David Weiss has managed to get a grand jury to indict Hunter Biden, son of the president of the United States, Joe Biden, According to court records, charged with the illegal purchase and possession of a weapon. Hunter Biden lied by claiming he was clean of drugs at the time he purchased a .38-caliber Colt Cobra in October 2018, according to the prosecutor. The indictment includes three charges. The trial may take place next year, in the middle of Biden’s race seeking re-election in the presidential elections on November 5, 2024.
The document registered in the courts indicates that around October 12, 2018, the defendant, Hunter Biden, presented a written statement “in which he certified that he was not an illicit user or addict of any stimulant, narcotic or any other controlled substance, when In reality, as he knew, said statement was false and fictitious.” He accuses him twice for this falsehood and for the subsequent possession of the weapon, which also became illegal.
The penalties provided for the charges brought carry a fine or prison sentences of up to a maximum of five years for one of them and up to 10 years for the other two. It is rare for prosecutors to pursue these types of crimes.
The criminal indictment comes two days after the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, ordered an investigation into impeachment on Joe Biden to determine if he committed any irregularities in relation to his son’s businesses. Although the charges presented by the prosecutor have no relation to that investigation, but to the descent into the hells of drugs, alcohol and self-destruction that Hunter experienced after the death of his brother Beau, there is no doubt that they represent a blow. for the president.
Joe Biden has always supported his son and has repeatedly appeared in public with him despite the investigations he is the subject of. The president, in fact, has praised Hunter for overcoming his addictions and straightening out his life.
The trial against Hunter Biden may overlap with the cases that Donald Trump, the president’s possible rival in the 2024 presidential elections, has open in court and which has led to four indictments for a total of 91 crimes.
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The president’s son initially admitted committing the illegal purchase and possession of the weapon as part of an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office to be sentenced with lesser penalties for two tax crimes already regularized and to archive the revolver case. The Prosecutor’s Office renounced pursuing these crimes for the purchase of the gun in exchange for him staying away from drugs for two years and for him to renounce having a firearm in the future, a common agreement in similar cases.
However, the parties had a different interpretation of the agreement. While Hunter Biden’s lawyers believed this would end all federal investigations into him, the Prosecutor’s Office considered itself free to file charges on other possible crimes stemming from the ongoing investigation into his business. Furthermore, the judge in charge of the case, appointed by Donald Trump, was reluctant to approve the agreement.
Under the pressure of Republican protests, who considered that the Department of Justice was giving favored treatment to the president’s son, the pact was left up in the air. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Weiss as a special prosecutor for this case, which gives him added independence, but it is the same one who had been investigating him in Delaware as a federal prosecutor since Donald Trump’s mandate. Investigations underway since 2018 have so far found no evidence of other possible crimes.
Paradoxically, in the accusation now received, Hunter Biden can have as a defense a Supreme Court ruling that his father harshly criticized: the one that enshrined the constitutional right to carry weapons in New York above state regulation. Recently, a federal appeals court in New Orleans, Louisiana, overturned a conviction for illegal possession of a gun, saying that the state law requiring a drug-free period ran counter to that right as interpreted by the court. Supreme. “Our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but they do not justify disarming a sober citizen based solely on his past drug use,” that ruling said.
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