Why it’s déjà vu for the soap opera Biden trial

There must have been a feeling of schadenfreude in the Trump camp as the Hunter Biden case began in Delaware this week. The ‘troubled’ son of US President Joe Biden is on trial for three felonies arising from a 2018 gun purchase while he was still a drug addict. He is accused of lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on an application by saying he was not a drug addict at the time and therefore illegally keeping that gun for 11 days.

And so, it’s the turn of the Bidens to come to court, a week after Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts in a case that many legal commentators had said was weak. Even though the Manhattan District Attorney, an elected Democrat, could not prove what specific additional crime was facilitated by the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels by Trump’s former lawyer which was allegedly paid back as legal fees, the jury found him guilty.

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In both trials, several points are intriguingly similar. In the spotlight are the privileged families of the two contenders for the White House in November 2024, although the accused are, in one case the candidate himself and in the other, his only surviving son. Moreover, the judges presiding over these trials supposedly belong to political camps opposite to the defendants, as indeed do the prosecutors. Indians like to believe judges do not have political views!

The judge in the Biden case, Juan Merchan was elevated to the bench first by New York’s mayor and then further up by the state governor, both Democrats. It was also found that he had contributed, albeit laughably paltry, sums to the 2020 Biden campaign and to an outfit called ‘Stop Republicans’. New York follows the guidelines of the American Bar Association barring judges from donating to political parties or candidates, but he was never censured.

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So, Merchan was not asked to recuse himself from the case either, despite Trump being the lightning rod for anti-Republican sentiment. And no matter how much Trump tried to protest a bias, it fell on deaf ears both in judicial circles and the media. Now the shoe is on the other foot as both federal judges in the Hunter Biden cases—one in Delaware and the other in California—are Trump appointees and cannot now be shoved aside on the same argument.

Federal judges Maryellen Noreika of Wilmington, Delaware, and Mark Scarsi of Los Angeles, California are both former patent lawyers and are therefore presumed to be sticklers for detail and fine print. Noreika is the judge for the gun trial while Scarsi will preside over the trial in which Biden junior stands accused of failing to pay taxes between 2016 and 2019, which begins in September. Both come at a crucial time in Biden’s re-election campaign.

But as Indians well know, there are other ways to ‘manage’ a trial. And more so in the US where 12 ordinary people—a jury comprising the accused’s supposed ‘peers’—decide the verdict. The Biden clan is arguably the most prominent political family in the small state of Delaware, like the Lalu Prasad Yadav parivar in Bihar. And they turned up in force for the first day of Hunter Biden’s trial, complete with the intimidating Secret Service bandobast.

The Trump family had paced their appearances in court during the seven-week trial of the former President, but those gathered there were less than awestruck, unlike Delawareans. After all, New York and New Yorkers are a different ballgame. Besides, the Bidens’ aura in Delaware is unlike the Trumps’ standing in New York. So, the Trump lineup in a Manhattan court could not have had the same impact as the strong Biden turnout in Wilmington.

Although Stormy Daniels provided the court plenty of titillating testimony about her alleged steamy encounters with Trump (which he still denies) the Biden trial seems more like an American afternoon TV soap opera in the genre of Dynasty or Bold and the Beautiful. But the Trump family and Republican supporters will note that the Biden saga has not attracted the kind of adverse comments that the Trump family’s complicated family tree invariably does.

US First Lady Jill Biden was there on the first day in an eye-catching purple trouser suit with daughter Ashley (Hunter’s half-sister), current daughter-in-law Melissa Cohen Biden and other family members including Hunter’s own son-in-law. And when the trial began the next day, Hunter Biden’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle arrived as a prosecution witness, as did his brother Beau’s widow Hallie who was also his lover at the time he was a drug addict.

There was also the wealthy Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris whose constant presence in Biden Junior’s life since 2019 has popularized a rather uncommon descriptor—sugar brother. Morris has been bankrolling the First Son’s lavish lifestyle, to the extent of even paying his taxes and buying the paintings he made. One of the many other ways he has helped Hunter is by providing him a private jet to fly to Arkansas to appear in a child support case.

A former girlfriend had a daughter there, now five years old, whose paternity Hunter denied until DNA proved it. The matter has now been privately “settled” with him agreeing on an undisclosed sum of money and some of his paintings but also a proviso that the girl will never use the Biden surname. The senior Bidens reportedly do not regard her as a grand-daughter. But Trump’s alleged paternity accusations have not been so soft-pedalled by the media!

Indians will understand the pressure on the jurors in Wilmington which the US media repeatedly describes as a “small town”. Even the Yadavs’ standing in Patna may not be comparable to the Biden heft in a town with a population of less than 75,000. Can a jury of Wilmingtonians remain immune to that while deciding if a Biden lied when he ticked ‘no’ on a query in a gun application form asking if he was a drug user, which three ‘exes’ have testified he was?

Both the Biden and Trump trials concern felonies that when committed by ‘ordinary’ people usually do not come to trial or lead to jail terms in case of a guilty verdict. But in both cases, the accused are not ordinary, the situation is not ordinary either, given that the presidential elections are round the corner. So as in the Trump trial and verdict (and possibly even sentencing) the unexpected should be expected even in the Biden case. Schadenfreude all round.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.