Hunter Biden Might Be Nailed by His Own Words

Hunter Biden's memoir, Beautiful Things, is coming up a lot in his federal gun case. It's also climbing the charts. According to USA Today, the memoir about Biden's journey through addiction and recovery reached No. 4,200 in the Amazon rankings on Wednesday, up from No. 338,000 on Sunday, the day before his trial began. Beautiful Things, released to rave reviews in 2021, reached No. 4 on the New York Times best seller list and No. 5 on Amazon's bestseller list before a slow fall. The new attention is undoubtedly due to the memoir's role in Biden's trial on three felony gun counts.

Prosecutors argue Biden knowingly lied on a federal form used to purchase a firearm in October 2018 when he denied that he was using or addicted to illegal drugs. It's hard to prove a person used drugs at a particular time unless there's a drug test. Lacking one, prosecutors are treating Biden's memoir as "a road map," reports the Washington Post. "The book will show he was addicted to crack before, during, and after his possession of the gun," prosecutor Derek Hines said Tuesday. More than an hour of the audiobook was played in court Tuesday, including a section in which the narrator, Biden himself, speaks of learning to cook crack in a California hotel in 2018, per the Post.

"It wasn't rocket science," Biden said in the audio. After buying drugs from a homeless woman, "I'd decided I wanted to cut out the middleman who could dilute the stuff with God knows what." Biden's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, argued the book is a window into Biden's state of mind in 2021, when he wrote the book, not in 2018. He added Biden filled out the federal form soon after completing "an 11-day rehabilitation program" and may not have considered himself an active drug user. The form only asked whether the signer was "an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance." Prosecutors will also use Biden's computer and phone messages to make their case. (More Hunter Biden stories.)