Prosecutors began presenting their case against Hunter Biden at his gun trial on Tuesday by showing the courtroom the first son’s infamous laptop and highlighting photos and messages from it.
Biden’s lead defense attorney Abbe Lowell looked at Judge Maryellen Noreika, with the silver laptop in his peripheral, and said he did not object to the government entering it into evidence. Lowell, however, also had opportunities to present his own case to jurors.
The panel of 12 Delawareans, who were selected one day prior, listened as both parties delivered opening statements and questioned prosecutors’ first witness, FBI agent Erika Jensen.
Jensen confirmed the authenticity of the laptop, as well as certain items of evidence from Biden’s computer data and excerpts from a memoir he wrote about his addiction battles.
Biden, who must be present in court every day, is facing three felony charges over allegations brought by special counsel David Weiss that he lied on a federal form about his drug use to purchase a revolver and that he possessed the gun for 11 days.
Derek Hines, a government prosecutor, stunned the courtroom on Tuesday afternoon when he pulled out Biden’s MacBook Pro and carried it over to the witness stand for Jensen to authenticate.
Jensen held the silver machine, wrapped in clear plastic, in front of her for all of the courtroom to see. Hines then entered it into the exhibit record and began reviewing with Jensen a wealth of evidence from it.
The momentous event comes after years of salacious headlines about what became known as the “laptop from hell.” The stories stemmed from Republican operatives obtaining Biden’s computer data and disseminating it to the media right before the presidential election in 2020.
Biden has never confirmed the authenticity of the contents of the laptop and has waged a lawsuit against its top disseminators, claiming the laptop contents were illegally hacked and manipulated. He has also signaled he may plan to raise chain of command issues with it at his trial.
Hines told the court the FBI subpoenaed the laptop from a repair shop in 2019 after receiving a tip about it.
Jensen confirmed that some data found directly on the laptop “sometimes” overlapped with Biden’s iCloud backup data that the government had received from Apple via subpoena. Jensen said the laptop was Biden’s because it contained a serial number that aligned with the subpoenaed data. She also confirmed investigators obtained an email from the iCloud data that showed an invoice from the repair shop to Biden that was dated April 2019.
Hallie Biden, with whom Hunter was in a romantic relationship, is expected to testify later in the trial that she retrieved the revolver from Hunter Biden’s possession and put it in a leather pouch that “he used to store his crack cocaine,” Hines said. She will then testify that she threw the pouch in a trash bin at a grocery store, the prosecutor said.
Hines noted he would “maybe” call a chemist to the stand to testify about cocaine investigators found on the pouch five years after they retrieved it.
Lowell in his opening statement said that the lab reports from the pouch testing would be flawed for several reasons, including because the government failed to test for fingerprints or any sort of dating information.
Prosecutors introduced into evidence three months’ worth of Biden’s bank records, which showed the first son withdrew an average of about $50,000 per month in cash from September to October 2019. During this timeframe, Biden was withdrawing “hundreds and sometimes thousands” of dollars nearly daily, behavior that is “consistent” with drug addiction, Hines said in his opening statement.
Biden may have hurt his case in advance in 2021 by publishing his memoir Beautiful Things. In it he vividly details his compulsive yearslong addiction to alcohol and crack.
Prosecutors must prove Biden committed the crimes “knowingly and with an intention to deceive,” Lowell said.
