The Hunter Biden Trial Was Too Sad for the Right to Properly Politicize It
Hunter Biden, in a first for a child of a president, has been found guilty of felony charges related to purchasing a firearm while addicted to drugs. And that news has been met with a surprisingly muted response from the right.
Donald Trump, in a comment, called the trial a “distraction.” Rep. Matt Gaetz called it “kinda dumb.” And Rep. Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary chairman who has made painting Hunter Biden as a criminal one of his signature political efforts, has said nothing. There have been few triumphant celebrations. For a party that has spent endless hours vilifying the president’s son, the GOP has been suspiciously quiet.
Why isn’t there more jubilation? Well, there is the obviously awkward fact that Hunter Biden was prosecuted for a firearm-related crime: The three charges were related to the fact that he claimed he was not a drug user in paperwork he signed to purchase a gun. Republicans won’t want to risk looking opposed to gun access; in a strange reversal of standard dynamics, the Democratic president’s son’s legal defense cited the conservative Supreme Court’s decision on Second Amendment rights to try to fight the charges.
But there may be something else going on here: Hunter Biden’s struggle with addiction may have proved too sad and, for so many Americans, too relatable to be politically useful.
Over the previous week, 12 Delaware jurors heard two narratives: one of a struggling addict who had, if just for a moment, pulled his life together, just long enough to legitimately purchase a firearm; another of a struggling addict who never found control. Either way, the story told in the courtroom through texts and testimonies from the various women in Hunter Biden’s life—his ex-wife, his sister-in-law, his ex-girlfriend, his daughter—showed a family deeply wounded by Hunter’s addiction.
The trial was a remarkable airing of intimate difficulties for a sitting president’s family. Witnesses spoke of affairs, of nights in strip clubs, of sleeping in cars, of all-night roaming in search of drugs.
But beyond the sordid details—the kind that led Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to share Hunter Biden’s near-nude photos at a public House committee hearing, and that caused some misguided liberals to make a dirtbag hero out of the president’s son—the picture of grief and suffering was more humanizing than humiliating.
The prosecution laid out plenty of evidence of the defendant speaking about his drug use around the time of the gun purchase. Prosecutors showed Hunter Biden texting his then-girlfriend Hallie Biden about a drug deal around the time in question—an exchange the defense feebly tried to wave off as a ruse to avoid seeing Hallie.
The defense couldn’t dispute the drug abuse—Hunter has been open about his struggles with addiction, writing of it in his memoir, Beautiful Things. But the defense did argue that the specific crime of lying on the form for a firearm would require Biden to have been regularly using drugs at the time he signed it. And the younger Biden, his lawyers said, had recently come out of rehab, clean for the time being, and convinced, too optimistically, that he was no longer addicted. It was a bleak defense.
In the courthouse, first lady Jill Biden sat in the front, there to provide emotional support for her stepson. Hunter’s half sister, Ashley, and his wife, Melissa, sat nearby.* On the stand, Kathleen Buhle, who was married to Hunter for 24 years, spoke of trying to shield their children from their father’s addiction after his brother Beau’s death in 2015, and of the collapse of their marriage in the years that followed.
Hallie Biden, Beau’s widow and, later, Hunter’s romantic partner, spoke of the depths of their shared grief. She described Hunter in the throes of his addiction, of her own use of crack cocaine after they started dating, of his pattern of lashing out and disappearing for weeks at a time. She worried he would kill himself; it was this fear that caused her to throw his gun in a grocery store trash can, ultimately leading to Hunter’s criminal charges.
And Naomi Biden, Hunter’s daughter with Kathleen, spoke of seeing her father less and less, because “after my uncle died, things got bad.”
“I’m really sorry, dad, I can’t take this,” one text of hers from the time, introduced as evidence, read. “I don’t know what to say, I just miss you so much.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been so unreachable,” Hunter Biden said in another exchange. “It’s not fair to you.”
The three felony charges—that he lied on paperwork to purchase a gun in October 2018 by saying he was not addicted to drugs; that he lied when he affirmed that statement; and that he illegally owned the gun for a little under two weeks—carry penalties of up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. It’s not likely that the judge will come down harshly, given that Hunter has no previous convictions. (President Joe Biden has also said that he will not pardon his son.) And the American public, so many of whom have been touched by addiction, will likely agree that Hunter shouldn’t be punished too harshly.
Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, told reporters on June 3, the day the trial began, that he didn’t “see any good coming from” Hunter’s charges. “I don’t think the average American would have been charged with the gun thing,” he said.
That defense likely related to his political obligation to support less firearm policing in general. But it also seemed to come from the everyman nature of the crimes. Struggling with drugs, buying guns—those aren’t the crimes of nefarious elites. Nor did the trial’s mention of Hunter’s own mental health struggles or the concerns of suicide remind Americans of the image Republicans are trying to portray: that of a man whose abuse of family power has allowed him to live a high life at the public’s expense.
That’s why, as Graham noted, Hunter’s tax troubles are where Republicans can see real promise. Hunter’s trial on tax-related charges is scheduled to start in September in Los Angeles.
And it’s why Donald Trump’s statement dwelled on “the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family,” which—we can infer—are the unsupported allegations right-wingers level about Hunter’s and his uncle James’ profits from overseas business.
Similarly, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on social media during the trial that Hunter should be prosecuted for his work with foreign businesses, not for the guns. She implied that the charges were a ruse, that the Justice Department was “trying to create sympathy for Joe Biden.” (The charges were brought by special counsel David Weiss, a Republican appointed by Donald Trump.)
Greene’s conspiratorial thinking aside, she may be on to something about the results: Joe Biden, a deeply unpopular candidate, has often been most appealing in times of national mourning, given his own image as a family man and man of faith whose life has been defined by grief. In his statement after the ruling, Biden said he “stands by his son” even as he accepts the outcome.
As I said last week, I am the President, but I am also a Dad. Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery. As I also said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal. Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that.
Had the outcome been different, Republicans could have used it to try to argue about a two-tiered justice system, one that victimized Republicans and let Democrats off the hook. But that didn’t happen, and so the only remaining move is to accuse the case of being a distraction from the real crimes, to redirect.
Rep. James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, had perhaps the most positive statement about the verdict, calling it “a step toward accountability”—but even then, he focused on the need to keep going after “the Bidens’ corrupt influence-peddling schemes.”
Hunter Biden still faces tax-fraud charges. Republicans are urging the DOJ to charge him with making false statements to Congress. But it’s remarkable that for a felony conviction for one of their party’s greatest villains, Republicans could not figure out a way to celebrate the victory. Hunter Biden’s tragedy was, simply, too all-American.