Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley shared his insight on the Hunter Biden gun possession and tax evasion case after Hunter pled “not guilty” in a Delaware court on Tuesday.
CNN reported Hunter pleaded not guilty to three counts related to his October 2018 purchase of a Colt revolver while reportedly being addicted to crack cocaine.
Department of Justice officials indicted Hunter on Sept. 14 for two counts of giving false statements regarding his drug use and a third count for gun possession while a known drug user.
Potentially, Hunter could face a maximum of 25 years in prison for the gun charges.
Turley shared in a Fox News report that Hunter’s legal team could employ an “interesting” tactic if the situation looks bleak for their client — seek dismissal of gun charges by citing a 2022 Supreme Court ruling the president opposed.
The legal analyst and constitutional attorney argued that Hunter’s legal team errored when they completely walked away from the controversial plea deal when it unraveled last July.
Turley noted that when you cease negotiating with the Dept. of Justice, they tend to respond with a full-court press. Turley said: “Once you basically have a deal like this collapse in court and you break off any agreement with the Department of Justice, they tend to go at you full bore.”
The analyst added: “They tend to go for all of the possible charges and we’re already seeing that on the gun side. We may see it on the tax side.”
When Fox News’s Bill Hemmer asked Turley, “What do you expect from the Hunter case? Because the Trump case could go into December if not into the new year. But on the Biden case, how long?”
Turley replied: “Well, the interesting unknown here is whether the Biden team will challenge the underlying federal law. This is a law that Hunter’s father supported and they would have to challenge it on the basis of Supreme Court cases that President Biden opposed, vehemently, from the Supreme Court.”
Turley added: “So it would be a bit of a reversal of fortunes and that could indeed be their plan. They could be arguing that recent federal cases make the underlying statute unconstitutional. That would create a rather interesting dynamic for the White House.”
Turley was referencing a notable 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen case the Supreme Court ruled on in 2022. In that case, the court found that gun control laws must be consistent with the “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
At the time President Joe Biden opposed the ruling and said it should “deeply trouble us all.”
It may be that Hunter’s legal team will cite the ruling and argue that gun charges should be dropped due to a lack of precedent that drug users are banned from owning guns.
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