Should you be so lucky as to have a publisher for your memoir, you’ll likely be pushed to make it as revealing as possible. Personal confessions – of, say, past drug use – can help a book become a bestseller, especially if your narrative is a redemptive one of healing and recovery. But beware of being hung on your own petard.
That’s one lesson from the speedy conviction last week of Hunter Biden, the 54-year-old son of President Biden, on all three felony charges related to his purchase of a revolver in 2018 after he had said on a mandatory gun-purchase form that he was neither using nor addicted to illegal drugs. Despite the political furor surrounding the case, coming hard upon the felony conviction of Donald Trump, the former president of the United States and presumptive Republican nominee for a second term, this really was an open-and-shut case. (So, for that matter, was Trump’s, which explains all the focus on whether the novel charges should have been brought as distinct from, say, whether Trump actually did that which he was accused of doing.
The jury did not have a difficult job when it came to the actual evidence.) Hunter Biden admitted to an addiction to crack cocaine in his 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things,” contemporaneous to the era when he filled out the form and bought the gun. Thus, the jury in this case had Biden’s own words to use in its process toward finding him guilty, especially since he had also helpfully recorded his own audiobook, addin.