Hunter Biden to be arraigned in Delaware court in gun case

Joe Biden’s son Hunter is set to be arraigned in a Delaware court on Tuesday in a politically fraught case that could unfold in the heat of the US president’s 2024 re-election campaign.

Hunter, 53, the first child of a sitting president to be indicted, is expected to plead not guilty to unlawfully possessing a gun as an illegal drug user and lying about his drug use on a background check form when he bought a Colt Cobra revolver in 2018.

The indictment was secured last month by special counsel David Weiss after a plea agreement between Hunter and prosecutors collapsed in August. The justice department has not said whether it will also bring an indictment over separate tax misdemeanour charges.

If convicted, Hunter faces a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison, although as a first-time, nonviolent offender who did not use the gun to commit an offence, a more lenient punishment is likely.

Hunter, who acknowledged past cocaine use in his memoir, is expected to ask district judge Maryellen Noreika to dismiss the gun possession charge by arguing that a federal law banning illegal drug users from owning guns has no historical counterpart and violates his right “to keep and bear arms” under the constitution’s second amendment.

He could receive an unlikely boost from the supreme court which, in a ruling last year, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc v Bruen, set a new standard to apply in judging the legality of gun restrictions imposed by governments, declaring that they must be consistent with “historical tradition of firearm regulation”.

Abbe Lowell, Biden’s defence lawyer, has suggested that he may challenge at least some of the indictment based on the Bruen decision.

In a public statement on the day of the indictment, Lowell said: “We believe these charges are barred by the agreement the prosecutors made with Mr. Biden, the recent rulings by several federal courts that this statute is unconstitutional, and the facts that he did not violate that law, and we plan to demonstrate all of that in court.”

Last week Hunter sued Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s former lawyer Robert Costello, accusing the pair of violating his privacy over data allegedly taken from his laptop. Republicans have made Hunter a key figure in an impeachment inquiry against the president but have failed to produce incriminating evidence.