Lawyers for Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, have issued subpoena requests against Donald Trump in an effort to show the former US president applied political pressure to high-ranking officials to push for a criminal investigation into his affairs.
The move, revealed in court papers filed on Wednesday, comes as Hunter Biden fights charges of illegal gun ownership in a case that threatens to reach a climax at the height of the 2024 presidential election campaign, in which Joe Biden and Trump are likely to be the two main candidates.
Hunter Biden, 53, pleaded not guilty last month in a US federal court in Wilmington, Delaware, to three charges relating to buying a Colt Cobra revolver while using illegal drugs. The case saw him become the first child of a sitting president to face criminal charges.
The court papers also reveal subpoena requests against Trump’s former attorney general William Barr and his two senior justice department deputies, Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue, and are an attempt to show that the investigation into Biden was subject to undue political interference.
The requests are aimed at shedding light on “certain instances that appear to suggest incessant, improper, and partisan pressure applied by then President Trump” on the three officials, according to the Washington Post.
The subpoena appeals appeared to have been prompted by accounts in Barr’s memoir, One Damn Thing After Another, published last year, in which the former attorney general describes getting angry with Trump for pressing him on the status of the investigation into Hunter, which opened in 2018.
In the memoir, Barr – who subsequently broke with Trump over his insistence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen – described a confrontational exchange in October of that year after the then president tried to engage him over a report about Hunter’s laptop aired by the rightwing channel Newsmax.
“Mr President, I can’t talk about that, and I am not going to,” Barr claimed to have replied.
When Trump pressed, Barr recounted cutting him off by saying: “Dammit, Mr President, I am not going to talk to you about Hunter Biden. Period!”
Prosecutors have accused Hunter Biden of lying in an application to buy the Colt in 2018 by saying he was not addicted to or using drugs. “In fact, as he knew, that statement was false and fictitious,” their indictment against him reads.
It is a criminal offence under federal law to possess a firearm while using illegal drugs. Hunter Biden has acknowledged his previous cocaine use in his memoir.
The charges carry a maximum 25-year jail sentence on conviction, although as a first time, non-violent offender, Hunter Biden is expected to be treated more leniently. He owned the gun for 11 days and did not use it during that time.
Republicans have sought to turn the charges, along with separate allegations relating to Hunter’s business affairs, into a political theme that could damage his father’s re-election prospects ahead of next year’s presidential campaign.
With Trump facing 91 charges of his own, House Republicans launched an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden in September, although no evidence has emerged that the president was involved in his son’s past business dealings in Ukraine or that he has interfered in a justice department investigation into the matter.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed a special counsel to investigate the affair last April.
