The cognition of pain Hunter Biden he parades daily into the federal courtroom in Wilmington, Delaware, in the form of the women in his life.
There is wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, who holds his hand in front of the photographers hidden behind the lenses of his dark glasses; there is his father Joe’s second wife, first lady Jill; there is ex-wife Kathleen Buhle, twenty-four years together, three children; there is Hallie Biden, widow of Hunter’s brother Beau, the military officer and Gulf veteran brother with political ambitions, the opposite of the chaotic, alcoholic, drug-addicted Hunter; there is former stripper Zoe Kestan who had a relationship with Hunter Biden in 2017-2018, at the height of his alcohol and cocaine addiction.
The ghosts of the grandmother and her little sister, who died in an accident
In this strange harem of women of flesh and blood – some present out of solidarity and affection and inevitable political convenience, some for the summons to the witness stand – there are then two ghosts: those of Neilia Biden, Hunter’s mother, and Naomi, his newborn sisterwho died in the winter of 1972 in the car accident that forever altered the history of the Bidens (the very young Hunter and Beau managed to survive the terrible impact with a truck: today Hunter is the only survivor).
Twenty-five years to purchase a gun
In one of the many paradoxical aspects of this process, in what Paul Auster in his penultimate book defined as “Bloodbath Nation”, “nation of carnage” in which there are almost 400 million firearms, more than one for every inhabitant including newborns , is that Hunter Biden he faces 25 years in prison for buying a gun, a Colt revolver, in 2018in a period of his life in which he used drugs (among the witnesses was the armory clerk who made him sign the declaration).
The Republicans, anxious to settle the score for Trump’s historic criminal conviction and so far unable to find anything criminally relevant against Hunter’s father, are therefore very focused on his son’s misdeeds, even if the almost absolute freedom to own weapons has been in place for decades a cornerstone of their philosophy, and a very popular theme among the electoral base.
The crimes
Hunter is on trial for three felonies stemming from the purchase of a handgun in October 2018, centered on false statements on a federal form regarding his drug use, despite having been in possession of the gun for just eleven days before Hallie Biden, that he had found the weapon in his car, threw it in a garbage can (to protect him, but thus causing him a lot of legal trouble, in hindsight).
Hunter recounted with very few filters in his autobiography (“Beautiful Things” published in Italy by Solferino) the years of addiction and the mourning for Beau’s death. And Hunter’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, one of America’s best criminal lawyers, is trying to cast doubt on part of the prosecution system that brought back to life Hunter’s mythological alleged computer that was allegedly forgotten by a strange repairman and then delivered to Rudy Giuliani very close to Trump.
The testimonies and the use of crack
According to the defense and its experts, the messages that would come from the computer are unreliable because they could have been modified, even if they had originally been authentic. What’s left? The testimonies, in fact. Of the people close to Hunter, who often defend him but do not hide unpleasant information: Hallie Biden – promptly made the front page of the Murdochian New York Post who endlessly rummages through the most unpleasant details of the trial against what is and remains a private citizen – admitted that, during her brief relationship with Hunter, she too used drugs.
THE Hunter’s problems with crack are dissected by witnesses, with Kestan admitting that he smoked cocaine in solid form every twenty minutes during their meetings. And, among the women in the trial, there is also FBI agent Erika Jensen who reconstructed Hunter’s crazy spending through 2018 bank transactions, but was unable to guarantee that the messages extracted from Hunter’s computer have not been modified before.
