A version of this story appeared in the On Background newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive On Background delivered directly to your inbox each Friday.
By his own admission, Hunter Biden owned a Colt Cobra .38 Special for just 12 days before his then-girlfriend Hallie Biden, the widow of his late brother Beau, took it out of his car and tossed it into a trash bin at a high-end food market in Greenville, Delaware.
Those 12 days have haunted Mr. Biden and, by extension, his father, President Biden, and Democrats’ broader political prospects as they prepare for the next big Election Day.
On Thursday, special counsel David Weiss announced charges against Hunter Biden, accusing him of lying on the federal background check form and of possessing the Colt Cobra while being a user of illegal drugs.
What about the other gun?
Video from his abandoned laptop computer appears to show a naked Mr. Biden holding a semi-automatic pistol, with the hammer cocked and his finger on the trigger. That is markedly different from the Colt revolver that resulted in charges against Mr. Biden.
“That’s not the handgun in the photo, so where’s that gun?” Dan Zimmerman, managing editor at TruthAboutGuns.com, told The Washington Times before Thursday’s indictment. “How many other guns did he own? He obviously owned at least one other. If he owned others, where are they now? How did he dispose of them?”
Questions about a second gun have swirled on firearms websites ever since RadarOnline first posted the laptop video screenshots. The matter has gone largely unreported in media accounts.
If Mr. Biden did obtain a semi-automatic pistol in Delaware, then he may have committed another crime. Under the state’s law, even private transfers that don’t involve purchases from federally licensed dealers are subject to background checks.
Mr. Biden’s attorney didn’t respond to an inquiry for this report.
What is known about Mr. Biden’s weaponry comes chiefly from his laptop, from news accounts and from the facts he admitted to in a document prepared for his court case.
According to that document, known as the diversion agreement, he bought the Colt revolver on Oct. 12, 2018, along with a box of ammunition and what is known as a speedloader, a device for loading a full set of bullets into a revolver at the same time rather than cartridge by cartridge.
SEE ALSO: Hunter Biden’s attorney blames MAGA Republicans for gun indictment
In making the purchase, he filled out Form 4473, the federal document used to complete the background check for every purchase made from a federally licensed firearms dealer.
He said his name was Robert Hunter Biden, was 6 feet, 1 inch tall, and weighed 175 pounds. He showed his passport to prove his identity. More consequentially, he checked “No” where the form asked whether he was a user of illegal drugs.
In fact, he now says, he had been using crack and powder cocaine since October 2016 and became a habitual user in 2017. By 2018, he was taking hits as often as every 15 minutes. He attended a rehabilitation program in August 2018 but relapsed by September and moved back to the East Coast.
He admits he was still using at the time of the gun purchase.
‘Do you want me dead’
On Oct. 23, according to the diversion agreement and text messages recovered from his laptop, Hallie Biden — at the time his lover — plucked the gun out of the trunk of his vehicle and dropped it into the trash at the supermarket. She told him she feared he was a danger to himself.
Mr. Biden berated Hallie Biden in a text message that day for going to authorities.
“It’s hard to believe anyone is that stupid,” he wrote. “So what’s my fault here Hallie that you speak of, Owning a gun that’s in a locked car hidden on another property?”
He followed up quickly with: “Do you want me dead.”
“I just want you safe. That was not safe,” Hallie Biden told him.
She said the car was unlocked with windows open when she took the gun. “The kids search your car,” she replied.
The Daily Mail sifted through Mr. Biden’s laptop texts and found some to his therapist where he expressed dismay at his lover’s actions. In one message, he said she tossed the weapon “for no reason” and left it on the top of the trash bin. In another, he said she had justified the move “due to my drug and alcohol problem and our volatile relationship and that she was afraid for the kids.”
He said he realized the weapon was gone “10 minutes after she took it.” He said he “scared the sh*t out of her” so she went back to the store to try to get it, but “it was gone which led to state police investigation of me.”
A man who searches trash cans for recyclables found the gun, Politico reported.
Mr. Biden bought the revolver at StarQuest Shooters in Delaware. Politico reported that the Secret Service showed up at the store demanding the background check paperwork after Mr. Biden lost possession of the weapon and authorities began investigating.
Store owner Ron Palmieri, sensing something amiss, refused. Politico said Mr. Palmieri thought the Secret Service would try to cover up the matter.
Mr. Palmieri later turned over the paperwork to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which has jurisdiction over gun sales.
Mr. Palmieri didn’t respond to an inquiry from The Times for this report.
Oddly, the Secret Service later insisted that it had “no involvement” in the matter, but Hunter Biden’s text messages said Secret Service agents responded to investigate the lost weapon.
President Biden, speaking to CNN last year, said he was unaware of his son’s gun situation, though he said his son’s struggles with drugs were well known. Hunter Biden was discharged from the Navy in 2014 after he tested positive for cocaine. In his 2021 book, he delved into his addiction, detailing dangerous drug purchases and the depths he sunk to as he fed his habit.
Prosecution
Hunter Biden had been prepared to admit to violating a federal gun law by lying on his Form 4473. Under what is known as a diversion agreement, Mr. Weiss had agreed to hold the charge in abeyance and have it expunged if Mr. Biden kept his nose clean while serving probation on separate charges of failing to pay taxes.
U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika raised questions about the arrangement at a July hearing, including whether the agreement foreclosed further charges against Mr. Biden and whether it was legal for prosecutors to turn over the decision-making on Hunter Biden’s compliance to a court.
The weight of those queries was too much for the agreement to bear.
Mr. Weiss has now responded with the new indictment, which includes two charges of lying during his firearms purchase and one charge of being a drug user in possession of a weapon.
Mr. Biden’s attorneys say he has been abiding by the diversion agreement since the day it was signed. They argue that prosecutors can’t go back on that now.
Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, a gun rights organization, said prosecutors never should have attempted the diversion agreement in the first place.
“The law spells it out pretty clearly that a person like Hunter Biden shouldn’t be owning a gun. And if you’re not going to enforce it against Hunter Biden, I don’t know how you’re going to enforce it against anybody else with a straight face,” Mr. Gottlieb said before the latest indictment.
He chided gun control groups for not speaking out about Hunter Biden’s situation.
Indeed, The Times reached out to several gun control groups about their perspectives on Hunter Biden’s gun. None of them replied to the inquiries.
“The silence is deafening,” Mr. Gottlieb said.
David Haas, a criminal defense lawyer in Florida, said bringing this type of case over a gun purchase is unusual.
“I would say more often than not, this is not charged,” he said.
Gun charges are attractive to prosecutors because they are easy to prove. If they can prove someone possessed the weapon and used drugs at the same time, or gave an untruthful answer about it, the case is made.
“There’s no way you’re going to beat that charge if you lied on a government form, essentially. It’s a box you check — I am not a drug user, I am not a felon,” said Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law. “From a prosecutor’s standpoint, this is quite a bit of leverage when you’re getting them to plead.”
Mr. Stevenson said there are usually extenuating circumstances when prosecutors make cases based on lying on the firearms purchase form or based on drug use and weapons possession.
“It’s really hard to find one that’s not a tack-on charge. In theory, it can happen, but usually it’s because there was a bust for a straw purchaser or somebody gets arrested for something else,” he said.
He said that’s not the case with Hunter Biden.
“If I were the prosecutor in a case like this, it would be a real question about whether to bring the charge and it would not take much to talk me into folding it into some sort of deferral agreement,” Mr. Stevenson said. “Yes, the stipulated facts are such that there’s no question he did it, but it’s not something the U.S. attorneys would usually bother with.”
The Justice Department has prosecuted cases in recent years that share some of the elements of Mr. Biden’s case, though they differ in key aspects.
In Iowa, Jumonie Dontez Wilson earned 21 months in prison as a drug user in possession of a firearm after posting photos to social media showing himself with a gun and possessing marijuana. Authorities said he was trying to deal drugs.
In Wisconsin, Esteban Bernard earned two years in prison for being a drug user in possession of a firearm — but he was also an illegal immigrant, another category barring a person from having a gun.
Mr. Biden’s attorneys have indicated that they might challenge the gun law itself.
In a 2022 Supreme Court ruling striking down state limits on who can be issued concealed-carry permits, the justices said that to comport with the Second Amendment, laws must have been the sort envisioned at the time of the amendment’s ratification in the late 1700s.
One federal appeals court in Louisiana ruled last month that the drug user prohibition in federal firearms law can’t survive that test. That same appeals court also nixed the part of the law barring firearms possession by those who are the targets of domestic violence court protection orders.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Delaware, ruled earlier this year that the law’s bar on felons possessing firearms is unconstitutional in light of the 2022 Supreme Court decision.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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