Hunter Biden was found guilty this Tuesday of the three charges he faced for lying about his drug use when purchasing a gun.
A jury in the US state of Delaware found President Joe Biden’s son guilty after a week of witness testimony and presentation of evidence in the criminal trial.
The first charge was for making a false statement to obtain a firearm, the second was for making a false statement to obtain the weapon in the records and the third is for illegal possession of a firearm.
All of them correspond to serious crimes that carry sentences with a maximum of 25 years in prison in total and a fine of US$750,000, although experts believe that the sentence that Joe Biden’s son would face could be much lower.
Hunter Biden is the first immediate family member of a sitting president to face a criminal trial, although the crimes were committed before his father’s term.
Who is Hunter Biden and why is he so controversial?
Tragedies, addictions and suspicions of influence peddling
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 Hunter, who 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.
A race that raises suspicions
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 in 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 maintained that they do not talk to each other about their jobs.
“This narrative that has been suggested and developed by the right-wing political apparatus 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.
Business with China
In 2013, Hunter Biden took a position on the board of directors of BHR, a Chinese private equity firm, first as an unpaid member and then as owner of a 10% stake in the fund.
The company was registered in Shanghai less than a fortnight after Hunter flew with his father on his official trip as vice president to China and met BHR’s chief executive, but just to have “a cup of coffee”The president’s son later said.
After his father left office in 2017, Hunter partnered with Chinese oil tycoon Ye Jianming on a natural gas project in Louisiana.
The deal collapsed after Ye was detained by Chinese authorities on corruption charges and subsequently disappeared.
Drugs and alcohol
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 prohibited in the United States, 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.
Another loss and a scandal
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 the help of his brother, 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 proceedings with Kathleen. But his relationship with Hallie did not last long because, according to him, the constant criticism they received.
The gun case
Taking the stand at Hunter Biden’s Delaware trial a few days ago, Hallie Biden testified that the president’s son had introduced her to crack cocaine and bought drugs in his presence. She also said that frequent use of it left him “agitated” and “very nervous.”
Two months after a stint in rehab in 2018, Hunter Biden bought a gun; What his defense team maintains was an impulsive purchase, under pressure from an aggressive gun store owner.
Prosecutors said he lied on the firearms application form by claiming he was not using drugs at the time. Hunter Biden’s lawyers argued that he did not consider himself an addict and that he was clean at the time.
Hallie Biden, who told the court she had confronted Hunter Biden about his drug use, found the gun and ammunition while again cleaning up “crack residue and paraphernalia.” [de drogas]” of your vehicle.
She described how, In a moment of panic, he put the gun in a shopping bag and threw it in a trash bin.11 days after the purchase of the revolver.
“I didn’t want him to get hurt or the kids to find him and get hurt,” she said.
In the end, the discarded weapon found its way to local police and the FBI, leading to the trial in which Hunter Biden was just found guilty.
Information of a “friendly” breakup between Hallie and Hunter emerged in 2019, less than a week after Joe Biden launched his third bid for the presidency.
A few weeks later, Hunter married South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen after a whirlwind six-day romance. The couple has a son.
Speaking in 2019 about his struggle with addiction, Hunter Biden said: “You don’t get rid of it. You figure out how to deal with it.”
The forgotten computer
A laptop computer abandoned by Hunter at a Delaware repair shop and the sordid contents found from its hard drive also figured prominently in the 2020 presidential campaign.
Biden’s team argued at the time that it was a “smear campaign” designed by Russian disinformationbut the hard drive has been authenticated by the American media and the FBI has it.
Analysis of its contents provided evidence of Hunter’s extensive income from his work in China and Ukraine, as well as evidence of his alcohol and drug use.
As President Biden accelerates his reelection campaign, the legal troubles of his son, who will face trial for tax evasion in the coming months, are proving to be an unwanted distraction.
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- “My father saved my life many times”: Hunter Biden, the controversial son of the US president, talks about his addictions