Hunter Biden and his attorneys have tried for months to convince a judge that the federal charges he's facing for being an unlawful user of drugs who lied on his paperwork when buying a gun are politically motivated and should be thrown out. While U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika is still considering his latest request to dismiss the case, she's not letting that request stand in the way of setting a date for his upcoming trial. 

On Wednesday Noreika determined that, absent a plea deal or a dismissal of the case, Biden will be in her Delaware courtroom in early June for the start of his trial, which could last as long as two weeks. 

He was indicted after a plea deal that would have resolved the case without the spectacle of a trial imploded in July 2023 when a judge who was supposed to approve it instead raised a series of questions.

Hunter Biden’s attorneys have since sought to have the case tossed out by arguing that prosecutors bowed to political pressure after the agreement was publicly pilloried by Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, as a “sweetheart deal.” 

They also argue that immunity provisions from the original deal still hold, a position that defense attorney Abbe Lowell pressed with the judge Wednesday.

Noreika said she hadn't fully decided how she would handle the case's four pending motions to dismiss but wanted to ensure that time for any trial would be available on her calendar.

Prosecutors have said there’s no evidence the case is politically motivated, the evidence against him is “overwhelming" and the immunity deal blew up with the rest of the plea deal.

While Noreika could grant Biden's request to dismiss the charges, I suspect if she were inclined to do so she would have already taken that step. Noreika is the judge who rejected the original deal over concerns that it gave too much immunity to any acts of wrongdoing with Biden's business dealings, so she's very familiar with the facts of his case, and I'd be shocked if she decided the charges should be dropped despite the "overwhelming" evidence against him. 

There's no question that Biden purchased a gun. There's no question that he was regularly using drugs when he did so, even though he attested on the Form 4473 that he was not an unlawful user of drugs when he purchased the revolver from a Delaware gun store in 2018. Biden himself admitted in his memoir that, during the time the gun was purchased, he was smoking crack "every fifteen minutes". 

Biden's chief defense has been that a Trump-appointed prosecutor is railroading him, though attorney Abbe Lowell has also raised a Second Amendment challenge to the charges; arguing that the federal statute barring drug users from purchasing or possessing a firearm is unconstitutional. 

Ironically, while Lowell contends that federal prosecution for being an unlawful user of drugs is almost unheard of, he's invoking a Fifth Circuit decision that involved that very charge to buttress his argument that the federal statute itself is unlawful. In U.S. v. Daniels the appellate court concluded that Darnell Daniels shouldn't have been prosecuted for being an unlawful user of drugs after he admitted to police that he regularly smoked marijuana while possessing firearms, because there is no historical tradition of banning users of intoxicating substances from exercising their right to keep and bear arms. The judges found that while there were multiple laws and municipal ordinances banning the possession of a gun while intoxicated at the time of the Founding and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, there's nothing in the historical record that indicates users of intoxicating substances were ever prohibited from owning a firearm until the modern era. 

I would be surprised if Lowell gets to make that case during trial, because I'm still inclined to believe that Biden's legal team will reach some sort of plea agreement with Weiss before June 3rd. The last thing Joe Biden needs when he's on the campaign trail is a high-profile trial involving his son's alleged violation of federal gun laws. Weiss might be immune from White House pressure to settle the case, but I don't think the same can be said for Hunter and his attorneys. If and when Noreika rejects Lowell's request to dismiss the gun-related charges, I expect that Team Hunter will earnestly seek a deal that will keep him out of court... and out of prison.