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By Sean O'Driscoll
Senior Crime and Courts Reporter
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The overwhelming evidence of Hunter Biden's drug addiction has left his trial defense in big trouble, legal analysts have said.
They spoke to Newsweek after the jury heard excerpts from the audio version of Biden's memoir, in which he said that he was addicted to crack cocaine for four years—including around the time he purchased a firearm from a Delaware gun shop.
Los Angeles-based trial attorney David Ring told Newsweek that Biden is "in trouble."
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"The evidence appears to be overwhelming that he was using illegal drugs and was an addict at the time he purchased a firearm and lied on the application about his drug use," he said.
Court records filed on Monday also showed that prosecutors allegedly have photos of Biden with a crack pipe and a video of him weighing out crack cocaine taken just over a month after he purchased the gun.
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Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, has pleaded not guilty to charges of making false statements on a federal form while purchasing a firearm in October 2018 and of illegal gun possession while being a drug user, specifically of crack cocaine.
He is the first child of a sitting president to go on criminal trial. The jury, who was chosen at a Delaware court on Monday, began hearing evidence on Tuesday. Newsweek sought email comment from Hunter Biden's attorney on Wednesday.
David Ring went on to say that Biden should have taken a guilty plea.
"Biden had agreed to a plea deal last summer. From media reports, it appears he would have pleaded to two misdemeanors and would likely not have received any jail time. But, for whatever reason, once that plea deal was floated out to the public, it cratered and fell apart. Which is why Biden now finds himself in a criminal trial facing these very serious charges."
Hunter Biden has maintained that the Justice Department is unjustly targeting him after Republicans criticized his previous plea deal as special treatment because he is the president's son.
A former federal prosecutor, Neama Rahmani, agreed that Biden should have taken a plea agreement that would have placed him in a diversion program to deal with his drug addiction.
Rahmani told Newsweek that, at the time that the deal was offered, prosecutor David Weiss was not in a position to offer a deal on all of Hunter Biden's federal investigations.
Weiss was later appointed Hunter Biden special counsel which gives him jurisdiction over all the federal cases involving Hunter Biden, including his alleged tax violations in California and, as a lobbyist, his alleged Foreign Agents Registration Act violations in Washington, D.C.
"Hunter Biden should have taken the diversion deal. His lawyers got greedy and wanted the plea agreement to cover all criminal investigations, but David Weiss was U.S. Attorney of Delaware at the time and not Special Counsel, so he didn't have jurisdiction over FARA violations in D.C. or tax crimes in California," said Rahmani.
"Diversion deals are rare in federal court. I put more than a thousand people in federal prison and never offered it once. Congressional Republicans called it a sweetheart deal, and they were right," Rahmani added.
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