Biden family’s most intimate personal struggles put on display in court

As President Joe Biden engages in the fight of his political life in a campaign focused on democracy and the rule of law, the most intimate details of his family’s ongoing personal tragedies have been publicly dissected in a courtroom over the last week.

As President Joe Biden engages in the fight of his political life in a campaign focused on democracy and the rule of law, the most intimate details of his family’s ongoing personal tragedies have been publicly dissected in a courtroom over the last week. Hunter Biden’s struggles with addiction after the death of his brother Beau Biden have been the focus of hours of testimony during his trial for federal criminal charges, putting some of the Biden family’s most personal problems on full display. The president’s son has pleaded not guilty to three felony counts connected to a gun he purchased in October 2018. For decades, the president has navigated the sometimes-competing demands of his political career and being a father, particularly when it comes to Hunter Biden. Part of the president’s enduring brand has been his ability to relate to the personal tragedies of others because of what his family has suffered, including the death of his first wife and daughter in a 1972 car crash that severely injured Beau and Hunter, and Beau’s 2015 death from brain cancer. The effect Beau Biden’s death had on his younger brother has been a focus in court. At issue in the case is whether Hunter Biden lied when he asserted he wasn’t an “unlawful user of, or addicted to” drugs on a form when he purchased a revolver in October 2018. Jury deliberations began Monday afternoon. In the government’s opening arguments, prosecutor Derek Hines argued “no one is above the law” regardless of their family name, echoing the Biden campaign’s response to Trump’s guilty verdict last month. To convince the jury that Hunter Biden was actively using drugs around October 2018, prosecutors laid bare the broken relationships and desperate measures he took to access drugs, through testimony of people close to him and, at times, with his own words. Prosecutors have also showed the laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019 – infamously at the center of many GOP attacks on the president and his son – and have used text messages pulled from the computer to make the case that Hunter was using drugs when he bought the gun.