According to recent reports, one of the 12 jurors in the Hunter Biden trial revealed what led to the decision to deliver a guilty verdict. The president’s son was convicted on all three felony counts related to the illegal purchase of a firearm in 2018.
The juror claimed a thread of revealing text messages between Hunter and his sister-in-law ultimately sealed the conviction in the case. Reportedly, the conversation between Hunter and Hallie Biden, the wife of his late brother Beau with whom he had a romantic relationship with, demonstrate his state of mind when purchasing the gun.
The juror, described as a 51-year-old black woman from upper Delaware, claimed, “[The text messages showed], in my opinion, he was training to get drugs.” According to the text messages, Hunter was allegedly intending to buy crack cocaine. One text indicated that he was smoking crack and sleeping in a car.
The juror claimed that Hunter Biden “looks kind of defeated. He looks kind of helpless to me” and that “I think he just needs to get away somewhere and get some real rehab if he hasn’t. Hopefully, he’s still not using.”
One juror stated, “No politics came into play, and politics was not even spoken about,” demonstrating the lack of political motivation behind their decision to convict Hunter Biden. The individual added that he believes Hunter should not face jail time.
“Deliberating, we were not thinking of the sentencing, and no, I really don’t think that Hunter belongs in jail,” he said. “If you looked at this case and you realize that when Hallie dumped that gun in a trash can, and it was retrieved, and Hunter Biden did not want to press charges because he was the victim of a theft of the firearm, he did not want to press any charges against Hallie and another thing that I also thought was they asked him, ‘did you want your gun back?’ And he said ‘no,’ he did not want that gun back.”
The president’s son faces up to 25 years in prison and nearly a $750,000 fine. However, it is anticipated that Hunter will receive a much lighter sentence since he is a first-time offender. “When he said he did not want that gun back. And that gun sat in evidence for almost five years, I think that may have been what led to his downfall,” the juror added. “Had he taken possession of that gun, I don’t know if we would even had the trial because he may have sold the gun, got rid of the gun, sold it back to a gun shop, or whatever,” he said. “And it wasn’t like it was sitting in evidence … I believe that means it was sitting in evidence and somebody got a hold of that and say, ‘hey, let’s check this out a little bit more. And see exactly how he obtained that gun.”
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Hunter’s sentencing date has not been scheduled, as there is typically a two—to three-month delay between conviction and sentencing in the federal court system. President Biden has indicated that he will accept the trial’s outcome and not pardon his son.
Featured image credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hunter_Biden_and_Abbe_Lowell_in_2023.jpg