Hunter's silver MacBook was physically held up in the courtroom for the jurors to feast their eyes on. The prosecution, using the notorious device as a visual and vehicle to introduce its sordid contents into evidence, laid the laptop down on the witness stand.
Following the computer's cameo, the prosecution presented pictures (either extracted from his laptop or scraped from his iCloud account) of a half-naked and, at times, fully nude Hunter blown up on the projection screen as trial exhibits. Crack pipes appeared in his hand, and a bong sat in the background.
At the outset of trial testimony, the defense disputed the relevancy of showing the jury Hunter unclothed. Well, it's because the nudes help prove Hunter's drug addiction around the time he illegally bought the handgun at the center of the case, the prosecution argued.
Prior to and after the gun sale, Hunter had withdrawn more than $150,000 in cash over a three-month period in the fall of 2018. Hunter's business entity, Owasco PC, was one of the accounts he had accessed for cash.
In a separate California tax evasion case, Hunter is accused of using Owasco PC to evade taxes, specifically that he "subverted the payroll and tax withholding process of his own company" by withdrawing millions from the corporate account outside of the typical payroll and tax withholding process.
Hunter's defense attorney Abbe Lowell told the jury that those cash withdrawals have an innocent explanation: Hunter, purportedly a high-flying business man, didn't carry a credit card.
"He withdrew cash for lots of things, which are the opposite of buying drugs," Lowell claimed.
Hunter, the "smartest man" President Biden knows and an attorney, also apparently didn't understand exactly what he agreed to when he signed the screening paperwork certifying that his statements are "true" and "correct," and that anything otherwise was a crime punishable under federal law.
"I understand" that anyone who answers "Yes" to Q #11E, the addict/user question, on ATF Form 4473 is prohibited from purchasing a firearm, Hunter attested with his signature. He checked the "No" box.
This is the crux of his defense — that he did not "knowingly" lie on the federal background check form; he acted honestly, even if he was mistaken or misunderstood the question of whether or not he is addicted to or doing drugs, because he did achieve periods of sobriety, albeit fleeting and almost always ending in relapse.
While it should be an open-and-shut case (you're either an addict/actively doing drugs or you're not), the defense says it's not that simple. It all comes down to how Hunter considered himself at the time he filled out the form — whether or not he identified as an addict.
Although, he self-identified as one in his memoir, "Beautiful Things," and boasted in his book about "finding crack anytime, anywhere," calling this ability his "superpower." For nearly an hour, the prosecution played passages from Hunter's audiobook, and the jury, as well as Hunter, heard his voice narrate excerpts detailing his drug-fueled escapades, such as "smoking crack every 15 minutes, 7 days a week."
He did not have the "intent to deceive" the federally licensed firearms dealer, Lowell insisted, noting that the survey question asks if the signatory "is" addicted to or abusing substances, not "have you ever been."
Playing the victim card, the defense suggested that Hunter was the target of a sleazy salesman, a self-described "whale hunter" who wanted to "bring in a big one," working at the gun shop.
The defense, during opening arguments, tried to paint a sympathetic picture of Hunter: a downtrodden First Son with a "traumatic" childhood who abused drugs and alcohol "like literally millions of people in this country" in order to "dull his pain."
Hunter's tales of woe just may sway the jurors, many of whom have personal ties to dealing with drug or alcohol abuse. In fact, the sad story Lowell told of Hunter looking for answers at the bottom of a bottle or at the end of a crack pipe might have elicited a tear or two from a choked-up juror who was spotted reaching for tissues to dab her eyes. Some of the jurors said in the midst of jury selection that they view addiction as a disease.
"Addiction may not be a choice," the prosecution conceded, but Hunter did choose to unlawfully own a gun.
Why
kick a crack addict while he's down? That's the tone the defense set
today as we resume cross-examination of the FBI agent who poured over
18,000 pages worth of Hunter's texts, pictures, and videos to produce
evidence of his crack-chasing exploits. See updates here: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/miacathell/2024/06/05/hunter-biden-gun-trial-day-3-n2640008
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