Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, was found guilty Tuesday of three felony charges stemming from his purchase of a handgun in 2018.
Biden, 54, is the first child of a sitting U.S. president ever to be convicted in a criminal trial. The president said last week that he would not pardon his son.
The jury of six men and six women issued its unanimous verdict after three hours of deliberations.
Biden remained perfectly still as a court clerk read the verdict aloud. Before leaving the courtroom, he hugged his lawyers and kissed his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden. He and his wife, along with first lady Jill Biden, departed from the courthouse a few minutes later in Secret Service SUVs.
Biden faces a maximum prison sentence of 25 years but is much more likely to receive two years or less — or even no prison time at all, because he is a first-time offender and the crimes involved only a single gun that was never used violently. Judge Maryellen Noreika, who oversaw the trial, will determine the sentence. She said she expects to conduct sentencing in about four months.
Biden also faces federal criminal charges for allegedly failing to pay more than $1.4 million in taxes on time. A trial in that case is scheduled to begin in September in Los Angeles.
Special counsel David Weiss brought both the gun case and the tax case after years of investigating the president’s son.
The gun-related charges spawned from Biden’s purchase of a Colt revolver at a Wilmington gun shop in October of 2018. At the time, prosecutors said, Biden was in the throes of addiction to crack cocaine. Prosecutors alleged that he signed paperwork at the time of the purchase falsely claiming he did not use illegal drugs.
It is illegal for drug users to possess guns, and it is illegal to lie on gun-purchasing forms.
Prosecutors said Biden possessed the gun for 11 days before his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, found it and threw it in a trash can outside a high-end grocery store. A man who scavenges through trash cans for recyclables then found the gun and later provided it to police.
Biden is sure to appeal the conviction. In pretrial motions, his lawyers contended that the federal law barring drug users from having guns is unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s increasingly expansive view of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Noreika, a Trump appointee, rejected the constitutional argument, but Biden’s team is expected to raise it again on appeal.
The trial began on June 3. Among the witnesses called by prosecutors were three of Biden’s former romantic partners, all of whom testified about his frequent drug use in 2018.
