The people who sat in the jury for Hunter Biden’s federal gun charge case said that they weren’t thinking about his father, President Joe Biden, or politics at all when they made their decision.
On Tuesday, Biden was found guilty of all three charges levied against him, which carry a maximum potential penalty of 25 years in prison.
On male juror, who requested to remain anonymous, spoke to BBC not long after the verdict, saying:
“I was never thinking of President Joe Biden.”
He added that all 11 other jurors in the case also thought it was “important” to ensure they were separating the case’s facts from who the defendant’s family is. He added:
“Out of all the jurors, nobody mentioned anything about political motivations. Somehow, you block that out of your mind.”
In the short time since the conviction was announced, there has been considerable political reaction to it.
Republicans in Congress who were behind the years-long investigation into Hunter Biden and the Biden family as a whole celebrated the verdict. Democrats, of course, insisted that this verdict wouldn’t affect the president’s campaign for re-election.
Two other jurors who spoke with CNN said they didn’t feel pressure when they were deliberating the facts of the case, even though the trial was so high-profile in nature — especially with the general election looming in November.
One juror said to CNN that she anticipated that the panel would be “at each other’s throats because [Biden’s] father is the president and because of the political climate.”
However, she added that once the deliberations began, she “didn’t feel pressure.”
While the jurors who spoke to news outlets said over and over again that politics didn’t play any part in their decision, some did say that they had qualms about the case itself.
One juror, for instance, said to CNN that the whole case “seemed like a waste of taxpayer dollars.” Another added that it was all “a little bit frustrating because it felt like we couldn’t get the full story.”
All that being said, it took the jury only about three hours to reach its verdict in the trial, which lasted for about a week.
With the guilty verdict, Hunter Biden is now the first child of a sitting president to be convicted of a crime. He was charged with lying about his drug use on a federal form when he bought a gun back in 2018.
He had pleaded not guilty to the charges, and opted not to seek a plea deal.
His lawyers argued in court that their client didn’t lie on the form because he hadn’t yet come to grips with the fact that he had a drug problem — and that he wasn’t on drugs at the time he filled the form out.
Now that the guilty verdict is in, Biden will be sentenced within the next 120 days. The judge who oversaw the case hasn’t yet announced a date for the sentencing.