In other words, they were told "Don't worry about it. It's taken care of."
Pardon or commutation, or maybe the fix is in with the Judge . Hunter should be in jail for taking bribes, tax evasion, money laundering, influence peddling, acting as an agent for a foreign government, and more. But buying a gun when he was a drug user is just cover for sweeping the others under the rug. It was the one crime that couldn't be tied to dad...
Hunter Biden’s Book Didn’t Fly Off Shelves. Prosecutors Loved It.
Audiobook of his memoir on addiction, played for jury, convicted him of gun charges
‘Hunter Biden’s Memoir Was a Road Map to Conviction for Prosecutors’
By C. Ryan Barber and Jeffrey A. Trachtenber, WSJ.com, June 16, 2024
pic——Hunter Biden carried a copy of his memoir as he arrived at federal court in Wilmington, Del., this month with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden. PHOTO: KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS
Hunter Biden confronted his demons of alcohol and crack cocaine addiction in his memoir “Beautiful Things,” which garnered favorable reviews but modest sales when it was released months after his father became president. The book came back to haunt him in court. The younger Biden’s trial on gun charges ended last week when a federal jury in Delaware found him guilty of falsely claiming he had no drug problem when he bought a .38-caliber Colt Cobra revolver in October 2018. Prosecutors used the memoir as a more than 250-page confession that effectively served as a road map to a conviction on three felonies.
As a bonus for the government, Hunter Biden had narrated the audiobook version, and prosecutors played portions of it in court, allowing jurors to hear the defendant in his own words discussing his use of crack cocaine during the same period as the gun purchase. That undermined Biden’s argument that he didn’t knowingly violate federal prohibitions on drug users owning firearms. “The book blew up in his face,” said Michael Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor and partner at the law firm Cole Schotz. “The government got the best of both worlds—admissions from him and statements from his own mouth without his own counsels’ ability to water them down.”
One key chapter was “Lost Highway,” in which Biden tells readers that he wasn’t well six years ago. “I had returned that fall of 2018, after my most recent relapse in California, with the hope of getting clean through a new therapy and reconciling with Hallie,” he said of his sister-in-law, with whom he had a romantic relationship following the death of his brother and her late husband, Beau Biden. “Neither happened.” “For all the obvious reasons—my extended disappearances, my inability to stay sober, her need to stabilize and reorder her own life and family—Hallie and I called it quits,” he wrote.
pic——Hunter Biden’s ‘Beautiful Things,’ released shortly after his father became president, has generated modest sales. PHOTO: AGNES BUN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Biden lawyer Abbe Lowell argued that the book was written reflectively and not as a contemporaneous diary. He told jurors that prosecutors had selectively plucked portions of the memoir to support their “conjecture and suspicion.”
“Beautiful Things” didn’t have particularly strong sales considering that the author’s father was president of the United States. Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books said it sold 61,000 copies through early June this year in all formats, including hardcover, paperback, digital and audio.
The trial has served as an improbable advertisement for the memoir, sparking a recent surge in sales on Amazon, according to data from Publishers Marketplace.
The book’s second life may be of little consolation to Biden, who will likely be sentenced in a few months. He faces up to 25 years behind bars, although any prison term is likely to be a fraction of that, given that he is a first-time, nonviolent offender. He is also expected to face a separate trial on tax charges in September.
The Yale Law School-educated Biden opted against testifying in his own defense in the gun case, which would have exposed him to a potentially withering cross-examination in a trial that already had aired deeply personal inner dynamics of the Biden family and the turmoil that his addiction wrought. Jurors heard plenty from Hunter Biden anyway.
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