Biden team braces for upcoming trials of Hunter Biden

At 8:30 a.m. on June 3, Hunter Biden is scheduled to report to Courtroom 4A in Wilmington, Del., facing his most dire legal peril to date and the possibility of a federal conviction on charges that he lied about his drug use when he purchased a firearm.

The next day, President Biden is scheduled to depart for Paris on a foreign trip that could not come at a worse personal moment. It sets up what could be a tumultuous month for the president, with his son scheduled to undergo two federal trials - one in Delaware and one in California - as the president takes two foreign trips, hosts a fundraiser with former president Barack Obama and holds a critical debate with his opponent Donald Trump.

Biden has increasingly expressed deep concerns about his son, worrying about him on a daily basis, partly reflecting a feeling of responsibility for, in a sense, putting Hunter in this situation, aides say. Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign at a time when his son was in the throes of a major drug addiction, and Hunter now faces constant, often humiliating, scrutiny because his father is president.

The legal vise tightening around Hunter Biden has also aggravated tensions between White House advisers and Hunter Biden’s legal team, and it has renewed concerns over how and whether some of Hunter’s lawyers will be paid. Those close to the Biden family worry that, after years of relative stability in his life as a recovering addict, Hunter now faces the real possibility of a federal conviction that could result in a prison sentence.

Hunter Biden’s trials - the second, on tax evasion charges, is scheduled to begin June 20 - come after weeks of blanket coverage of Trump’s own criminal trial involving an adult-film actress and allegations of adulterous sex and hush money payouts. Hunter Biden’s trials could draw attention from that tawdry testimony to Hunter’s own less-than-savory activities including drug abuse, payments to pornographic sites allegedly written off as business expenses, and benefiting from his famous family name.

There are vast differences in the two cases - chief among them that Hunter Biden is not running for anything - but Republicans are certain to seize anew on these embarrassing episodes in the Biden family’s past. And while President Biden has often refrained from speaking publicly about a case that his own Justice Department is prosecuting, it has weighed heavily on him in ways that have close aides and advisers deeply concerned.

“He is fully capable of what will be a demanding month,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said in an interview. “If I would be concerned about anyone’s ability, it would be former president Trump, who has all the stresses of being a defendant, not just a parent.”

Federal prosecutors and attorneys for Hunter Biden declined to comment for this article.

Rarely in the history of the presidency have political drama and personal anguish converged in this way: An aging president who has lost two children faces the trial of a third during perhaps the most important month of his reelection campaign.

“The Hunter drama has been going on forever, and I know it has to take a toll on him,” said veteran Democratic strategist James Carville. “He’s just got to soldier on, just gut through it.”

Carville said Biden’s success in the month of June does not hinge primarily on the trips to France and Italy or on his son’s legal woes, but rests almost entirely on his performance in the debate with Trump.

In mid-June, the president is scheduled to attend a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles that will feature Obama, just a few days before - and a few miles away from - his son’s trial for allegedly failing to pay federal taxes. That second trial could still be underway when Biden debates Trump on June 27, making the case a potential topic in the debate and an unwelcome distraction as Biden prepares for it.

Biden has in the past cleared his schedule during key moments involving his son, such as when Hunter Biden was set to plead guilty last July - an agreement that ultimately collapsed, leading to the upcoming trials. The president has generally tried to avoid commenting on the ongoing investigations, but he has also declared his son’s innocence. “My son did nothing wrong,” Biden said during a presidential debate in October 2019.

Last May, he remained steadfast on that point. “My son has done nothing wrong,” he told MSNBC. “I trust him. I have faith in him.”

Hunter Biden and his attorneys for months have attempted to delay both the gun and the tax case with the aim of pushing them back by several months, and possibly past the election. They have filed interlocutory appeals - raising aspects of the case before an appeals court even before the trial commences - in hopes of having the cases delayed or dismissed. The tactic is similar to those Trump’s attorneys have used to delay some of his cases.

Special counsel David Weiss, who is overseeing the prosecution of both cases against Hunter Biden, has vigorously objected to these moves, casting them as little more than stalling tactics.

U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika in Delaware last week issued a scheduling order setting up the gun purchase trial to begin on June 3, rejecting attempts by Hunter Biden attorney Abbe Lowell to push it back. Judge Mark C. Scarsi, the judge in California, has indicated that the tax case will also move forward as planned, with the current schedule providing for it to get underway on June 20. (Late last week, Lowell asked the judge to move the tax trial to Sept. 5, citing the Delaware case. Federal prosecutors have opposed the delay.)

Hunter Biden’s lawyers say he is being selectively prosecuted as the president’s son, arguing that other people suspected of similar offenses do not face years-long investigations and aggressive criminal prosecutions.

His team also argued that he was being charged as punishment for his father’s defeat of Trump in the 2020 election.

The judges have broadly rejected such claims, in part by citing President Biden’s current role as the ultimate supervisor of the Justice Department. “Defendant’s claim is effectively that his own father targeted him for being his son, a claim that is nonsensical under the facts here,” Noreika wrote in one of her rulings.

The trials come after Hunter Biden has weathered a lengthy investigation by House Republicans, who complained that he improperly benefited from his father’s position when Joe Biden was vice president - and that the elder Biden benefited from his son’s business dealings. But Republicans have struggled to present any direct evidence and have largely dropped their impeachment plans.

That has focused attention on the court proceedings and the highly unusual spectacle of a president’s grown son facing a potential criminal trial at the time his father is revving up his reelection campaign.

Adding to the surreal quality of the moment, Trump has hurtled between the courthouse and the campaign trail as he faces a trial on allegations of falsifying documents related to hush money payments. The former president faces three other potential criminal trials, on charges of mishandling classified documents and allegedly conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election, although those proceedings may be pushed beyond the Nov. 5 election.

A potential plea agreement between Hunter Biden and federal prosecutors, which would have avoided the need for trials, blew up a year ago under questioning from Judge Noreika, largely over a dispute over whether it would protect Hunter Biden from additional charges in the future.

The Delaware case centers on a claim Biden made, on the forms required to buy a gun on Oct. 12, 2018, that he was not addicted to illegal drugs - when, the indictment says, “he knew that statement was false and fictitious.” If he is convicted, the maximum sentence for the most serious crime in the indictment would be 10 years in prison, although Hunter Biden would likely face far less time under federal sentencing guidelines.

That case is fairly straightforward, attorneys on both sides say, and the president’s son has already admitted to using drugs during this period. Prosecutors have even submitted passages from Hunter Biden’s own memoir as evidence of his addiction.

Prosecutors still may face challenges in winning the case at trial. Hunter Biden’s team is likely to argue that prosecutors rarely pursue someone for such a paperwork violation unless it is tied to a more serious crime, which it is not in his case. And the charge of lying on the government form needed to purchase a gun represents a small percentage of the nation’s firearm-related prosecutions.

In California, Hunter Biden is facing three felony and six misdemeanor charges that prosecutors say could result in a maximum penalty of 17 years in prison. That case involves the alleged failure to pay at least $1.4 million in federal taxes from 2016 through 2019. Hunter Biden’s allies say he has since paid the taxes.

Prosecutors recently filed an extensive list of evidence they plan to introduce in that trial, including emails, texts and business documents. The documents include correspondence between Hunter and his children - the president’s grandchildren - and with his uncle, the president’s brother.

Charges aside, the trial could reopen a window into some of the less savory chapters of Hunter Biden’s life, episodes he has sought to put behind him. The prosecutors’ evidence list includes documents from his divorce from Kathleen Buhle; tax forms from Hallie Biden, his brother Beau’s widow, with whom he had an affair following Beau’s death; and Lunden Roberts, the woman with whom he had a child that he denied until she took him to court.

Based on the list of 321 possible exhibits, it also appears that prosecutors may delve into some of Hunter Biden’s controversial business arrangements in Ukraine and China. Investigators have spent years examining whether those arrangements violated the law, but those probes have not yielded any charges against Hunter Biden.

Adding to the stakes, his legal problems come at a time of growing financial anxiety in Hunter Biden’s camp, according to people close to him. Over the past several years, the president’s son has been heavily subsidized by Kevin Morris, a close friend and benefactor. Morris and others close to Hunter at one point explored a legal-defense fund as a way to raise money to pay for his mounting legal bills, ultimately deciding against it.

Hunter Biden, while pursuing a career as an artist, has lacked a steady source of income in recent years, according to an array of documents and friends and associates who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters.

Perry Stein contributed to this report.