Trial of Hunter Biden: Why the son of the US president is so controversial

Robert Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, this Monday became the first son of a sitting president to face a criminal trial.

Prosecutors allege that Hunter Biden, 54, lied about his drug use on the form required to purchase a gun in 2018.

You can face up to 25 years in prison if he is found guilty of the three federal charges in the process that began this Monday with jury selection in Delaware, in the northeast of the United States.

Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty of the charges against him.

The trial comes in the middle of his father’s campaign, Joe Biden, for re-election in the presidential elections scheduled for November 5.

Prosecutors are expected to delve into details about the president’s second son’s crack addiction, which could benefit the opposition campaign led by former president Donald Trump.

Although the current leader of the White House has repeatedly refused to make statements about the court case, he stated at the beginning of the trial that he feels “unlimited love” and “trust” toward his son.

“Hunter’s resilience in the face of adversity and the strength he has brought to his recovery are inspiring to us,” added Joe Biden.

Hunter Biden faces three federal charges: two for making false statements and one for illegal possession of weapons.

All charges are related to the purchase of a revolver at a Delaware gun store in October 2018, a weapon he kept for about 11 days.

By the accused’s own admission, at that moment he was immersed in the agony of a “total addiction” to crack.

The two false statements charges stem from allegations that he lied about his drug use on a federally required form when he purchased the gun.

Specifically, prosecutors allege that he falsely claimed that he was “not an unlawful user or addict of any narcotic stimulant” when he purchased a Colt Cobra Special revolver.

The third charge is related to possession of a firearm while allegedly using drugs.

The weapon was discarded and discovered in a container near a grocery store in Greenville, Delaware, sparking an investigation that ultimately led investigators to the form.

To convict Hunter Biden, prosecutors will have to convince jurors that the defendant knowingly made false statements on the form in an attempt to deceive the store where he purchased the gun.

Additionally, they will have to prove that Biden used drugs or was addicted to drugs and still decided to take possession of the gun.

But who is Hunter Biden and why is he so controversial?

At 54 years old, Hunter Biden carries a past in which tragedies, addictions and suspicions of influence peddling are interspersed.

Hunter was raised in a family where everyone worked to contribute to his father’s political career.

In 1972 his father, just 29 years old, combined his electoral campaign for the Senate for the state of Delaware with raising the three children he had with his wife Neilia: Beau, 3 years old; Hunter, 2; and Naomi, who was still a baby.

Biden was in Washington DC when his family, who was driving to buy a Christmas tree in Delaware, was involved in a traffic accident. Neilia and Naomi died.

Beau and Hunter were injured, but survived. According to what Hunter has said in interviews more than once, the oldest memory he has is waking up in the hospital and hearing his brother whisper to him: “I love you, I love you.”

The following month, Joe Biden was sworn in as senator at the same hospital, at his son Beau’s bedside.

Hunter grew up remembering Neilia as mommy (mommy) and calling mom to Jill Jacobs, the woman his father married in 1977.

He and his brother spent a lot of time in the Senate, sitting on their father’s lap while he worked or playing in other senators’ offices, as he told the magazine. The New Yorker for a report published in 2019 with the title: “Will Hunter Biden endanger his father’s campaign?”

Hunter graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in History in 1992, after combining his studies with several unskilled jobs with which he contributed to his living expenses.

The following year, he volunteered at the Oregon Jesuit Volunteer Corps, where he met Kathleen Buhle, whom he married a few months later and had a daughter. Over the years, the family grew with the arrival of two more girls.

After getting married, he entered Georgetown Law School and then transferred to Yale, where he had not managed to enter directly.

The American press has pointed out for decades the relationship between Hunter’s jobs and those of his father.

“Since then [cuando se graduó de abogado]much of Hunter Biden’s career has coincided with his father’s work as a senator and vice president,” reads a report published in July 2019 in the newspaper Washington Post.

“It is true that many children of influential parents end up with very good jobs. But Biden’s case is worrying. After all, he is a senator who for years has preached against what he claims is the corrupt influence of money in politics” , read a 1998 article by The American Spectator.

What do they refer to? To positions such as senior vice president at the MBNA bank (one of his father’s largest donors at the time), lobbyist in Congress, or member of the board of directors of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings little after his father (then US vice president) offered help to Ukraine to increase its gas production.

Faced with suspicions of influence peddling, father and son have always defended that they do not speak to each other about their jobs.

“This narrative that has been suggested and developed by the right-wing political establishment is demonstrably false,” Hunter said of the Burisma Holdings case in a statement sent to Washington Post.

Hunter joined the board of directors of that company, the largest gas production company in Ukraine, in 2014.

In the summer of 2019, a military officer alleged that then-President Donald Trump had pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to collaborate in his attempt to prove that Joe Biden had tried, as vice president, to remove from office a prosecutor who was investigating alleged irregularities committed by his son in this European country, although suspicions of collusion with corruption weighed on the prosecutor in question.

The matter ended up causing the first impeachment (impeachment trial) against Trump, who was accused of having used his position as president to harm a political rival, although the Senate – with a Republican majority – finally exonerated him.

But Hunter Biden not only generates controversy for his professional life, but also for his personal life.

In the interview with The New Yorkerthe lawyer and businessman spoke openly about the fight against his addiction to drugs and alcohol, a battle he has been fighting for decades.

He has been in and out of various rehabilitation centers, has resorted to yoga and meditation, has taken medications to reduce withdrawal anxiety and drugs that cause nausea every time he consumes alcohol.

He was admitted to a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, that offered treatment with ibogaine, a natural psychoactive substance banned in the US, and until He participated in a program that required him to carry a breathalyzer with a built-in camera.

However, he has relapsed many times throughout his life.

In 2013, for example, he managed to get the Navy to admit him despite his age. A few months later, however, he was expelled: the urine test performed on him on the first day of service came back positive for cocaine.

Although on that occasion, Hunter denied having used drugs and attributed the results to a cigarette that, he said, was given to him by some South Africans he met on the street.

His addiction to alcohol and drugs such as cocaine and crack damaged his relationship with his wife.which further deteriorated when, in 2015, the conservative news website Breitbart accused him of being a user of Ashley Madison, a dating service for married people.

Hackers had attacked Ashley Madison, revealing the names of many of its users. One of them was Robert Biden, who according to Breitbart, was Hunter, something he denied.

In his relapses, Hunter always had the help of one of the most important people in his life: his brother Beau.

Beau was emerging as Joe Biden’s successor in his family’s political legacy. “I was pretty sure Beau could have run for president one day and that, with his brother’s help, he could have won,” Joe Biden wrote.

He wrote these words in his book “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose,” in which the patriarch talks about how hard it was to lose his eldest son.

Beau died in 2015. The previous two years he had undergone all kinds of treatments to try to eliminate a brain tumor until he died when he was taken off respiratory assistance.

As a former White House aide told The New Yorkerdespite all the mistakes that Joe Biden may have made, what “seems to redeem him” to his voters is “how he responds to tragedies and what he learns from them.”

His son Hunter, however, suffered a relapse and was affected by the Ashley Madison scandal shortly after Beau’s death.

No longer with Kathleen, he began to lean on his sister-in-law, Hallie, with whom he shared the loss of Beau.

The following year, they began a relationship that, although they tried to keep it secret due to the scandal that could cause him dating his brother’s widow, ended up coming to light.

Added to this was a bitter divorce process with Kathleen. But her relationship with Hallie did not last long because, according to him, the constant criticism they received.

In May of this year, Hunter married Melissa Cohen, a South African filmmaker whom he had met a few weeks earlier.

As he told The New Yorker: “Look, everyone suffers. Everyone has trauma. In every family, there are addictions. I was in the darkness. I was in a tunnel, a tunnel with no end. You don’t get out of it. You look for a way to deal with it. it”.

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