Delaware politely ignores Hunter Biden’s gun trial

WILMINGTON, Delaware — In a season of historic trials for Donald Trump, Hunter Biden’s trial on charges he lied about his drug use on a gun purchase form was always destined to be an undercard event.

But the local response to the first-ever criminal trial of a sitting president’s son, in which prosecutors are highlighting the tabloid-worthy aspects of the defendant’s personal life, has been notably muted for another reason: the venue.

Wilmington is a city of 70,000 long dominated by a graying, tight-knit and overwhelmingly Democratic establishment, where President Joe Biden still runs errands and attends funerals on weekends. Even locals who chafe at the Bidens’ long reign as the First State’s foremost family tend to observe certain delicacies.

“I haven’t heard much said by anyone about it,” reported the state’s former Republican Party Chair Charlie Copeland, a member of the blue-blood Du Pont family whose longtime grip on Delaware politics loosened and then all but disappeared during the latter decades of the 20th century. Copeland’s theory about the reticence: “His dad is rather powerful with a deep network in a very small state.”

In a place where most residents of a certain age have had some personal contact with the first family, many would rather watch the trees grow than talk about the most attention-grabbing local trial in recent memory.

That’s literally the case for Lee Ramunno, who milled about outside his law office, a block from the federal courthouse, sipping coffee on the trial’s eve. Ramunno, 84, was once active in Delaware Democratic politics, and said he has long known and liked Joe Biden.

As for the gun case, “I don’t hear too much talk about it,” he shrugged.

A question about the overgrown fig trees in front of Ramunno & Ramunno elicited a more effusive response, along with the story of their planting and a series of arboriculture tips.

Since the late ’60s, when Joe Biden began a brief stint as a practicing lawyer here in Wilmington, the number of legal professionals working here has ballooned as the city has positioned itself as a corporate and banking capital.

Despite that growth, Ramunno said that most of what passed for a cohesive legal community here has withered away, as the new breed of corporate lawyers stick to themselves and increasingly work from the suburbs. The downtown rumor mill has run dry, and even if lawyers in Wilmington wanted to kibitz about the salacious trial, Ramunno said that the watering holes they once haunted have closed.

“We used to have those places,” he explained.

Indeed, downtown Wilmington in late May and early June exhibited a sleepiness to rival Provence in August. Nightlife is limited, and young staffers who decamped here for Biden’s reelection campaign have been complaining about the lack of dating prospects.

For the Bidens, the gun case began even closer to home, in the nearby suburb of Greenville, where the president maintains his residence.

It was here in 2018 that Hunter Biden’s then-girlfriend Hallie Biden — widow of his late brother Beau Biden — discarded a gun she found in his truck in a trash receptacle outside of the family’s neighborhood grocery store. The incident at Janssen’s Market set off a bizarre series of events that culminated in this week’s trial.

The president still regularly stops by Jannsen’s for lunch, and customers at the deli can order the “Joe Biden” sandwich — maple-glazed turkey, havarti cheese, arugula and champagne mustard.

In such close quarters, all politics is personal, and locals expressed more interest in minor, decades-old sleights than the family’s scandal du jour.

Tim Sedlacek, a semi-retired mason who stopped for lunch at the Janssen’s sandwich counter last Thursday, expressed skepticism that members of a president’s family would ever be held responsible for law-breaking. “They’re basically exempt,” he said.

But Sedlacek was more perturbed by his experience meeting Joe Biden at a since-closed Chrysler plant years ago than by Hunter Biden’s alleged misdeeds. The future president, he said, came across as disingenuous. Hunter Biden, who tagged along with his father, made a better impression.

“He was nice,” Sedlacek, 62, recalled, before steering the conversation toward his experience in a 9th grade English class taught by the future first lady, then known as Jill Jacobs, at the Wilmington Catholic school St. Mark’s. (The nuns, he said, did not approve of the way the attractive young teacher carried herself.)

Many others in Greenville demurred.

“People stay away from the political conversation around here,” explained Ken, 68, a clerk at Jacques Ferber — a luxury outerwear retailer one strip mall over on the Greenville thoroughfare Kennett Pike — who declined to provide his last name. “People avoid the confrontation.”

Next door at Jos. A Bank, where Joe Biden remains a regular customer, a clerk shared that the president bought casual pants last week but declined to talk politics.

Outsiders to Wilmington sometimes spoke more freely. “The man’s family’s already had enough crap done to ‘em,” said store manager Johnnie Morrison, who hails from Scotland, resides in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and started working in the president’s neighborhood earlier this year.

A few blocks from the courthouse, a transplanted New Yorker put things even more bluntly. “Half our children is on drugs,” protested Liz Robinson, 71, a retired professor and drug treatment professional who relocated to Wilmington last year. “All of this big whoop-whoop is bullshit.”

The trial has drawn a healthy smattering of national news outlets. On Monday, when jury selection began, members of the media began lining up outside the courthouse by 5 a.m. But after reporters filed past the framed photograph of the defendant’s father that hangs inside the courthouse entrance, they discovered there was space in the courtroom to spare.

While Jill Biden, Hunter Biden’s half-sister Ashley Biden, his second wife Melissa Cohen Biden and a handful of other personal supporters showed up for the proceedings, members of the general public took up few, if any, seats in the gallery.

The small-town dynamics extended to jury selection. As the first lady looked on, one potential juror disclosed that he had worked with her at Delaware Technical Community College, where she taught English for a decade and a half.

One woman who worked as a bartender and looked to be in her 20s disclosed that the defendant’s uncle John Owens — husband of the president’s sister Valerie Owens — was a regular patron.

“Wilmington’s a small place,” said a third potential juror, who disclosed that she knew the defendant. The woman became emotional as she described her husband’s close friendship with the late Beau Biden, the state’s former attorney general, and said he had been a “very good man.” The judge overseeing the case, Maryellen Noreika, promptly excused her.

Outside on the sidewalk, the trial’s opening drew a lone protester, who hoisted a sign listing the first family’s alleged misdeeds. (“We’re not a picketing state,” one local political grandee said before the trial after being repeatedly assured of anonymity.)

By the time the first day of proceedings came to a close, the trial had also drawn a single heckler, a man in dirty jeans and a ballcap who stood across the street smoking a cigarette. As Hunter Biden exited the courthouse, the man shouted at him, but not about politics. He asked if the first son remembered some encounter they’d had years ago.