Hunter Biden Gun Trial Tentatively Scheduled for June, as His Lawyers Claim, Again, That Prosecutors Unfairly Killed Plea Deal

Hunter Biden’s criminal trial for lying about his drug addiction in order to buy a handgun has been tentatively scheduled to begin in early June — but the presiding judge in the case says she is weighing whether to throw out the charges based on motions made by Mr. Biden’s attorneys. During a conference call hearing on Wednesday, prosecutors for Special Counsel David Weiss and defense attorneys for Mr. Biden haggled over when the trial should begin. The prosecution asked that the trial start in early May, but Mr. Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, claimed that such a timeline would be unnecessarily “rushed.”Mr. Lowell also noted that Mr. Biden has another looming criminal trial — this one for allegedly dodging millions of dollars in personal income taxes over the course of several years. Mr. Lowell asked that the gun charges trial be pushed back to the summer. Judge Maryellen Noreika said she would be willing to tentatively schedule the trial to begin either during the week of June 3 or June 10, in Delaware, and told Mr. Lowell to resolve any scheduling issues with the federal judge in California who is presiding over Mr. Biden’s tax case. Both the prosecution and the defense agreed that the trial shouldn’t take more than five days. Mr. Weiss’s prosecutors said on the call that the tax trial, on the other hand, could take “several weeks.”Mr. Lowell also asked Judge Noreika to give expedited consideration to the four motions for dismissal he has made in her court. The most important one, he says, is the argument that Mr. Biden cannot be prosecuted by Mr. Weiss’s office because prosecutors and Mr. Biden’s defense attorneys had signed a plea agreement last year that would have let Mr. Biden avoid jail time.The plea deal would have covered both the gun and tax violations, and spared Mr. Biden from any future prosecution for his past misdeeds. It collapsed in Judge Noreika’s courtroom last year, having come under intense criticism from Republicans for being “a sweetheart deal.” “The first motion that you are considering is one that should really be decided by you, we think, and that has to do with whether or not either of these cases can proceed based on the agreement that we believe exists,” Mr. Lowell said on the call. “As a defense attorney, I’ve made hundreds and hundreds of pretrial motions and I don’t believe I’ve made one that I believe is more merited.”If that motion to dismiss fails, Mr. Lowell says, “then let’s go to trial.”Judge Noreika said she will consider that motion to dismiss as soon as possible.

Hunter Biden Gun Trial Tentatively Scheduled for June, as His Lawyers Claim, Again, That Prosecutors Unfairly Killed Plea Deal

Hunter Biden Gun Trial Tentatively Scheduled for June, as His Lawyers Claim, Again, That Prosecutors Unfairly Killed Plea Deal

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