Hunter Biden drops request for new gun trial
By Marshall Cohen, CNN
(CNN) — Hunter Biden has withdrawn a request for a new gun trial, according to court filings.
President Joe Biden’s son is still pursuing several other challenges to his felony gun convictions, and is expected to expand those efforts soon by asking an appeals court to throw out the guilty verdicts.
His lawyers told a judge Tuesday that they were withdrawing their recent request. They previously claimed there was a procedural mishap regarding one of his pretrial appeals that should’ve prevented the trial from commencing – but they conceded Tuesday that they apparently misunderstood the situation.
Their now-withdrawn motion for a new trial claimed District Judge Maryellen Noreika didn’t have jurisdiction to hold the gun trial because of a technical hiccup that – in their view – meant the appeals court, and not Noreika, still had jurisdiction over the case.
But they conceded Tuesday that the appeals court did, in fact, return jurisdiction to Noreika when it rejected one of his many pretrial appeals. They accepted an explanation offered in court filings Monday from special counsel David Weiss, who pointed out that the pretrial paperwork from the appeals court explicitly returned the “mandate” of jurisdiction back to Noreika.
“The defendant’s motion is meritless and is based on his apparent misunderstanding of appellate practice and his failure to read the Third Circuit’s Orders,” prosecutors wrote Monday.
Weiss prosecuted the gun case and has also indicted Biden on tax charges in California. A trial in that case is scheduled to begin in September.
The decision by Biden’s team to withdraw the motion Tuesday is the latest development in a clumsy attempt to seek a new gun trial. His team initially filed this request on June 17, only to remove it from the docket within an hour. They re-filed the request on June 24, making the same arguments, but withdrew that request Tuesday.
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