Judge Orders Documents, Search Warrants Unsealed in Hunter Biden Prosecution
Biden is due to spend weeks in the headlines as his criminal trials loom, he prepares for his impeachment inquiry deposition, and the press learns more about the special counsel’s years-long investigation.
Search warrants and other documents related to Hunter Biden’s alleged criminal activity will soon be made public following an order from a federal judge at Wilmington, Delaware, who was asked to unseal the information related to Mr. Biden’s two ongoing criminal prosecutions.
Two of the warrants were issued in 2019, another was issued in 2020, and the fourth was issued just in December 2023.
The motion to unseal said documents was made by an independent journalist, Marcy Wheeler, who says it is in the public’s best interest to see the records.
“I make this request pursuant to the public’s right of access to judiciary records, grounded in both the federal common law and the First Amendment,” Ms. Wheeler writes to Judge Noreika. “The public has a particularly strong interest in transparency regarding the scope and timing of the searches involving content attributed to Mr. Biden.”
Ms. Wheeler notes that the four subpoenas were issued pursuant to the special counsel’s investigation of the first son’s firearms violations and tax evasion. The two other subpoenas were issued for Mr. Biden’s infamous laptop and his iCloud account, where many of his text messages were stored.
Special Counsel David Weiss’s “investigation has been the subject of sustained congressional inquiry since April 2023 and is one prong of an impeachment inquiry authorized by the House of Representatives,” she continued.
In legal filings in response to Ms. Wheeler, neither Mr. Weiss’s office nor Mr. Biden’s attorney objected to the subpoenas’s publication.
Mr. Biden fils is in for a banner few weeks as his two criminal trials loom and he remains under investigation by Mr. Weiss and his office for possible violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, among other offenses. On February 28, he will sit for a deposition before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, which have been investigating allegations that he acted corruptly in representing foreign business partners and inappropriately involved his father, then the vice president, in his business affairs.
Before Mr. Biden had search warrants issued against him in 2019, he had been struggling with a severe drug addiction and, in 2018, lied about his drug use to illegally purchase a handgun in Delaware in 2018. According to a detailed report in Politico, his then-girlfriend and widow of his brother, Hallie Biden, found the gun in his truck, after he’d only owned it for a few days, and threw it away in a garbage bin outside an upscale grocery store at Wilmington. When Hallie told her paramour what she had done, they rushed to the store to try to retrieve the gun, but it had already been removed by a scavenger. Ultimately, the police were involved.
Politico further reported that, also in 2018, the Secret Service went to the gun store at Wilmington, Delaware after Mr. Biden had purchased the gun so they could obtain the paperwork the first son had filled out to get his weapon — a form which he has since admitted to lying on by swearing that he was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. According to Politico, the gun store owner, sensing the Secret Service officers were seeking to cover up for Mr. Biden, refused to give them the documents and ultimately handed them over to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Five years later, Mr. Biden would be charged with multiple felonies related to the gun purchase.