After eight years of investigation, the Justice Department has won its case against Hunter Biden.
The jury ruled Biden guilty on multiple counts on Tuesday in the Delaware case asking whether the president's son violated the law when he filled out a form to buy a gun and swore under penalty of perjury that he was not addicted to drugs at the time of the purchase.
There had previously been a plea agreement, but it was later withdrawn by the prosecutor.
Such cases are not normally prosecuted as they are extremely difficult to prove. In this case, however, Biden wrote a tell-all book about his struggle with addiction, Biden gave a timeline of his relapse, which prosecutor Leo Wise argued revealed the false statement on the form.
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“He knew he was using drugs, that’s what the evidence shows,” Wise said in the closing arguments, referring to Biden's text messages about drug use and large cash withdrawals from ATMs around that time, NBC reported.
The prosecutor also brought up the first lady, Dr. Jill Biden, who sat in the audience for much of her son's trial. Joe Biden's brother and sister were also in the courtroom to support their nephew, NBC News pointed out.
“People sitting in the gallery are not evidence,” Wise said. He explained that jurors "may recognize" some attendees from the news or the community, “respectfully, none of that matters.”
Biden's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, went through the prosecution's case point by point, disputing each statement, claiming that the statements made could never be proved.
CBS News reporter Scott MacFarlane said Lowell used the word “conjecture” several times when attacking the DOJ's case.
"He accused prosecutors of trying to pull a magician’s trick on [the] jury by shifting attention from important details," MacFarlane posted on X.
The defense lawyer argued that the DOJ was taking Biden's words from his book "out of context."
"But calling yourself an addict at an AA or NA meeting, or in retrospect, is 'not the same' as legally acknowledging that you are currently a drug user," said Lowell.
“Hunter has not asked anyone to excuse the mistakes he has made: using drugs and alcohol to dull the pain that he felt," he added.
Lowell also called the prosecutor's cross-examination of Hunter Biden's daughter, Naomi, "extraordinarily cruel." At one point, they asked if she had ever done drugs.
"Lowell glared directly at prosecutors as he spoke, raising his voice and banging his fist on the lectern," CNN reported at the time.
Ahead of the closing statements, legal affairs analyst Paula Reid told CNN that Biden could do jail time if convicted
Congressional Republicans have also demanded that the DOJ charge Hunter Biden with a crime for "lying to Congress."
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