Hunter Biden has decided to withdraw his recent request for a new gun trial, as per court filings. The son of President Joe Biden is currently pursuing various challenges to his felony gun convictions and is expected to further expand these efforts by seeking to have the guilty verdicts overturned by an appeals court.
His legal team informed a judge on Tuesday about their decision to withdraw the request. They had previously argued that a procedural error related to one of his pretrial appeals should have prevented the trial from proceeding. However, they acknowledged on Tuesday that they had misunderstood the situation.
The now-withdrawn motion for a new trial contended that District Judge Maryellen Noreika lacked jurisdiction to preside over the gun trial due to a technical issue that, in their interpretation, meant the appeals court retained jurisdiction over the case. It was clarified in court filings on Monday by special counsel David Weiss that the appeals court had indeed returned jurisdiction to Noreika when it rejected one of Biden's pretrial appeals.
Prosecutors criticized Biden's motion as being without merit, attributing it to his misunderstanding of appellate practice and failure to review the Third Circuit's Orders. Weiss, who prosecuted the gun case, has also indicted Biden on tax charges in California, with a trial scheduled to commence in September.
This latest development follows a series of missteps in Biden's attempt to secure a new gun trial. His legal team initially filed the request on June 17, promptly removing it from the docket within an hour. A subsequent filing on June 24 reiterated the same arguments but was withdrawn on Tuesday.