Hunter Biden's attorneys are once again requesting a dismissal of his conviction on federal gun charges in Delaware and a new trial. This has turned into something of a soap opera at this point because his lawyers already made this request once, before turning around and withdrawing the appeal less than an hour later. This time, Hunter's team isn't even attempting to claim that he was incorrectly convicted and was actually innocent. They are filing the appeal based on what they claim was a procedural error by the court. They originally filed an appeal with the 3rd US Circuit Court challenging his prosecution. The court rejected the appeal before the trial began, but Hunter's attorneys are saying that the court failed to issue a standard mandate returning the case to the lower court in a timely fashion. 

Hunter Biden is requesting a new trial in his federal gun case, with his lawyers claiming that there was a procedural issue in the timing of the early June trial that resulted in a guilty verdict against him.

His lawyers claim that the trial court did not have jurisdiction over his case because of appeals that he had filed challenging his prosecution. The defense team says that the conviction must be wiped away because, even though the appeals court had rejected the appeals by the time the trial started, it had not issued what’s known as a “mandate” – the procedural maneuver that effectively notifies a lower court of ruling made by a higher court in an appeal.

Biden’s lawyers are pointing to the absence of a mandate sending the case back to the trial court after the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals handed down rulings rejecting two of his appeals in late May.

This sounds like a rather silly objection at first glance. Hunter Biden was not denied his opportunity to challenge his prosecution on these charges. The appeals were filed and they were considered by the 3rd Circuit and rejected. But the defense team may unfortunately still have a chance of prevailing here. The state is supposed to dot all of the i's and cross all of the t's when ensuring that citizens have every opportunity to defend themselves against prosecution. This was obviously just a procedural error that didn't affect the outcome, but it was still an error nonetheless. 

With all of that said, should we really expect any sort of a different outcome even if Hunter is granted a new trial? This was a jury of Delaware residents who should have been as friendly of an audience imaginable for someone named Biden. Yet they deliberated less than eight hours total before finding him guilty. The prosecution built a bulletproof case that was apparently impossible for them to ignore, no matter how sympathetic of a figure they might have found Hunter to be or how much the First Lady glared at them from the audience. The case against him would not be any weaker the second time around.

Of course, this could be little more than a stalling tactic. Working through this appeal could be time-consuming and there is only a little more than four months left until the election. Hunter's attorneys may be focusing on simply keeping him out of jail until the election is over. That might be possible, particularly because Hunter will be able to appeal even if he is convicted for a second time. Even if Joe Biden loses the election, he would still have a couple of months to issue Hunter a pardon or at least commute his sentence. Yes, it's true that The Big Guy promised he wouldn't do that, but he lies constantly. Particularly if he's on his way out the door anyway, do you really think he wouldn't make sure the First Son is taken care of before he goes?

The same can probably said for Hunter's pending tax evasion trial in California, perhaps to an even greater degree. The gun charges had nothing to do with Joe Biden, but the tax charges involved vast sums of money that Hunter brought in from his shady foreign dealings that could create a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to his father. Joe Biden will probably be highly motivated to ensure that those charges never see the light of day.