More like threats.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/14/hunter-biden-lawyer-house-republicans-00116140
Hunter Biden’s lawyer said Thursday that prosecutors caved to House Republicans’ political pressure when they secured an indictment of the first son.
So it would appear to be a shitty loser of a case that normally a DA would not have touched with a 10 foot pole.
I still wonder about the chain of custody of the laptop. For all we know, it spent 3 months with Putin and friends.
per cnn:
It is the fifth day of Hunter Biden’s federal gun trial in Wilmington, Delaware.
While buying the revolver in Delaware in 2018, prosecutors accuse Biden of lying on a federal form, swearing that he was not using, and was not addicted to, any illegal drugs — even though he was struggling with crack cocaine addiction at the time of the purchase.
Here’s who has been on the stand so far:
Prosecutors have two more witnesses — an FBI chemist and a drug expert from the DEA. They expect to rest their case after that.
Prosecutors have called FBI forensic chemist Jason Brewer to the stand.
Brewer is expected to testify as an expert witness about the powder and residue found on the pouch that was with Hunter Biden’s gun.
The substance tested positive for cocaine, prosecutors have said, but the defense notes that it wasn’t tested until 2023 and have suggested the pouch may have belonged to Hallie Biden.
per cnn:
Prosecutors have called FBI forensic chemist Jason Brewer to the stand.
Brewer testified that the powder found on the pouch with Hunter Biden’s gun tested positive for cocaine.
“Cocaine was identified within the residual white particles that I sampled,” he said.
While the case was recovered in 2018, the defense notes that it wasn’t tested until 2023 and have suggested the pouch may have belonged to Hallie Biden.
On cross examination, defense attorney David Kolansky highlighted that the amount of residue – which tested positive for cocaine – was “minimal” in the bag.
“Correct,” Jason Brewer, the agent, said.
Brewer also confirmed that the bag wasn’t analyzed by him until years after it was obtained by authorities and that he didn’t test for fingerprints and couldn’t determine when the drug residue was put in the bag.
DEA special agent Joshua Romig has taken the stand.
For people who are so up in arms about the government and weaponizing the DOJ, they have a lot of law enforcement and government agents on their witness list.
Again, either I’m not following the prosecution’s case here or they’re still just using the “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” strategy.
Were I on the jury, I’d struggle with this one.
I wouldn’t. There’s reasonable doubt for sure.
Which moves us on to the next question - are the prosecution:
A) Spectacularly incompetent;
B) Deliberately tanking the case in order to push the false narrative that “Biden’s justice system” is biased; or
C) Both?
Making the best case they can out of a bunch of dog shit evidence that is either circumstantial or highly tainted. For a case that normally they never would have brought to trial, absent political pressure from moron legislators.
Fair enough, although I’m still surprised the question “Was Hunter right or wrong to tick this box” has spawned such a circus of irrelevant evidence and rhetoric.
What people?
This special counsel, David Weiss, is, or was, a nominal Republican, but does not have a history of being “up in arms about the government and weaponizing the DOJ” that I have seen. Consider this February news story:
Once there is a special counsel appointed, heightened scrutiny that can lead to a crime being prosecuted that might otherwise be ignored, as here. Plus Hunter was unlucky when an honest dumpster diver turned in his gun to police.
I am very concerned about this:
Trump defends vow to prosecute rivals, saying ‘sometimes revenge can be justified’
But what is happening with Hunter, in the gun and tax cases, is not Trump’s lock-em-up revenge. It is more the normal heightened scrutiny that can impact those associated with powerful political figures.
This reminds me of the time I was on a grand jury and I seriously asked myself “whose wife did this guy sleep with to get these charges laid?” Granted, my guy probably did what they suggested, which is all a GJ needs, but it was clear to me that somebody in power had it out for him.
If I was on this jury, I might be asking myself why I was forced to waste an entire week because someone is trying to throw a guy in jail for checking “no” on a form, that I know for damn sure everyone checks “no” for.
More like: Hunter was unlucky when an investigator went through hours of video surveillance tape and tracked down the guy who found the gun in a dumpster. Perhaps a subtle difference, but it shows the lengths some were going to to find evidence. Even tainted evidence with questionable chains of custody.
The former state trooper who investigated Hunter Biden’s missing firearm told the jury he eventually found the gun from an old man who took it from the grocery store trash can.
Millard Greer, after “multiple days of surveillance” located the man who others had said collected recyclables at the store, he testified.
When Greer approached the man and said someone threw away something they shouldn’t have, the old man replied, “yes, they did,” according to Greer.
I mean, if I was a defense attorney (which, thank the Gods I am not), I"d be asking how many people had access to this dumpster, how many others had access to this gun (or the mystery bag with drug residue in it), how long the gun was in the hands of the dumpster diving dude, how the private investigator stored and handled the gun after he found it, and more.
I’m not seeing much reasonable doubt here in the key facts:
The wording of the form is bad, no doubt. But I don’t think it’s so bad that there’s legitimate ambiguity. It requires deliberate effort to construe it in such a way that his “no” answer is accurate.
But the defense could introduce reasonable doubt, in one of a few ways:
The last one is, I think, going to be a hard case to make, but if they can make it, it seems like the surest defense. I don’t know if the others would qualify as a defense against the charges.
Were I on the jury, based on what I’ve read so far, I’d be leaning toward “guilty.”
per cnn:
DEA special agent Joshua Romig has taken the stand.
A special agent from the DEA with 25 years of investigating drug crimes who looked at Hunter Biden’s texts, Romig explained to the jury the various drug terms related to cocaine.
For instance, Romig said “baby powder” and the “really soft stuff” referred to powder cocaine, in some of Hunter Biden’s texts.
“It’s rudimentary, pretty standard code,” Romig said.
Special counsel David Weiss’ team has rested its case against Hunter Biden.
Prosecutors presented several days of extensive evidence of Hunter Biden’s addiction to crack cocaine in the months around his 2018 gun purchase.
The special counsel’s office called 10 witnesses to stand across four days. Jurors heard from several women who had relationships with Hunter Biden and witnessed his addiction.
One of those witnesses, Hallie Biden, testified about finding a gun in Hunter Biden’s truck and getting rid of it in a grocery store trash can.
Defense attorneys have argued that prosecutors don’t have direct evidence that Hunter Biden used the drugs in the month he made the gun purchase at the center of the case.
The president’s son faces 3 charges for allegedly purchasing and owning the firearm while using illegal drugs.
As is common in criminal cases, Hunter Biden’s lawyers have asked the judge to acquit him now that the prosecutors have rested their case.
One of the grounds is that the prosecution is improper under the Second Amendment.
Judge Maryellen Noreika sounded skeptical of one of their other grounds, based on an amendment to the gun possession law.
“It’s an interesting concept,” she said.
Noreika will not be ruling on their motions at this time.
The defense says they will first call to the stand one of the employees at the gun store where Hunter Biden bought the weapon, as well as the owner of the store.
The jury is on a break at the moment.
It’s been said before, but doesn’t this come down to the fact that the question on the form is ambiguous at best?
If I needed to get a driver’s license, and the form had a box that said “are you a user of beer?” I would check “no”, because I did not have a beer in my hand at that time, and also, I fully intended to go home and pour out my delicious beer from the fridge and pledge to never drink it again.
Now, if the question was “do you have any beer at home?” or “Have you drunk a beer in the past week?” I would have to answer “yes”
Might be an interesting question of the FBI agent: “In all your years in law enforcement, have you ever, even once, seen a form where someone checked yes to that question?”
This is why I asked if there’s an addictions expert on the defense’s witness list. The thought process that leads an addict to insist he’s not an addict, and to interpret “I haven’t use drugs this week” as “I’m not an illegal user of drugs,” is so common as to be cliche. They would assert this and believe it.
It is entirely plausible to me that an addict could have answered as Hunter did and believed it truthful. Your lean toward guilty, I think, is applying a reasonable person standard to an unreasonable person. That doesn’t work in establishing intent. If they need to prove that Hunter knowingly answered falsely, they have missed the mark, IMO.
My personal experience with this, which includes hundreds of people, makes reasonable doubt a no-brainer, unless I misunderstand what the prosecution’s burden is.
Are you a runner? No, as you can see, I am currently at this moment, standing still.
Do you brush your teeth? No, as you can see, I am not currently brushing my teeth.
In what looney-tune land do people answer questions like that?
This is where the judge’s instruction on the law will be key. I honestly don’t know whether the law applies a “reasonable person” standard or a “defendant’s belief” standard. Does anyone here know for sure–ideally, with a cite?