WASHINGTON – US President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was indicted on Thursday for illegally buying a gun when he was using drugs, casting a new shadow over his father’s campaign for re-election in 2024.

Biden, 53, was charged with two counts of making false statements when claiming on forms required for the 2018 gun purchase that he was not using drugs illegally at the time.

A third charge said that, based on the false statements, he illegally possessed the gun during an 11-day period in October that year.

If convicted on all three felony charges, Biden could in theory face 25 years in prison, though in practice offenders are seldom punished by any jail time.

In attesting that he was not an unlawful user of drugs when he bought the Colt Cobra revolver, Biden “knew that statement was false”, the Justice Department said.

The indictment came two days after Republicans in Congress opened an impeachment probe against President Biden, alleging that when the Democrat was vice-president, he benefited financially from his son’s foreign business dealings.

The legal troubles of the younger Biden present a target for the political rivals of his father, who is bidding for a second term in the White House.

Biden is a Yale-trained lawyer and lobbyist-turned-artist, but his life has been marred by alcoholism and crack cocaine addiction.

Without offering any evidence, Republicans have accused President Biden’s Justice Department of protecting his son and US Special Counsel David Weiss, a Republican appointee, of going easy on him.

Mr Weiss was named by US Attorney-General Merrick Garland as a special counsel in August.

Representative James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky who will be leading the impeachment inquiry, welcomed the filing of the gun charges, calling it a “very small start”.

“Mountains of evidence reveals that Hunter Biden likely committed several felonies, and Americans expect the Justice Department to apply the law equally,” Mr Comer said.

Twice-impeached former president Donald Trump reacted on his Truth Social platform. “This, the gun charge, is the only crime that Hunter Biden committed that does not implicate Crooked Joe Biden,” he said.

Plea deal collapsed

But a leading Democrat, Ms Keisha Lance Bottoms, former mayor of Atlanta and a former senior adviser to President Biden, questioned why the younger Biden had been charged.

“Can anyone tell me how many people have been federally indicted for purchasing a gun while dealing with substance abuse issues?“ Ms Bottoms said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“I don’t know the answer, but in my over 29 years as an attorney, I have never heard of it.”

The gun charges were filed by Mr Weiss, who has been investigating Biden since 2018 over various allegations, mostly related to his overseas business deals.

Two months ago, a plea deal between Biden and Mr Weiss, covering the gun charges as well as alleged tax violations, went sour.

Biden agreed to plead guilty in federal court in Delaware to two minor tax charges. In exchange, he was offered probation, as he had already paid what he owed the government along with penalties.

Mr Weiss agreed to suspend the felony gun charges if Biden completed “pretrial diversion”, which often involves counselling or rehabilitation.

But in a dramatic July 26 hearing, the deal collapsed over whether Biden would have been immune from any other charges also investigated by Mr Weiss, including possible crimes related to his business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere.

The judge mentioned the possibility that Biden could be charged as having acted as a lobbyist for foreign governments without registering with the Justice Department.

Three weeks later, after the deal collapsed, Mr Weiss dropped the tax charges and said an indictment on the gun charges would come by the end of September.

As the 2024 election race swings into gear, Republicans in the House of Representatives on Tuesday formally opened an impeachment inquiry against President Biden.

They alleged, without offering hard evidence, that while he was vice-president in 2015-2016, Mr Biden intervened to protect an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, where his son sat on the board.

Republicans alleged the President and his family reaped large sums for helping Burisma. AFP

Judge Maryellen Noreika of the US District Court in Wilmington sharply questioned elements of the deal’s structure, telling the two sides repeatedly that she had no intention of being “a rubber stamp”.

Her objections centred on two elements of the proposed deal. One was a provision that would have offered Biden broad insulation against further prosecution on matters scrutinised by federal prosecutors during the five-year inquiry.

The other had to do with the diversion programme on the gun charges, under which she would be called on to play a role in determining whether Biden was meeting the terms of the deal.

The judge said she was not trying to sink the agreement but to strengthen it by ironing out ambiguities and inconsistencies.

But by the end of the tumultuous hearing, the sides had splintered, prosecutors filed paperwork indicating they would proceed with a prosecution, and the embattled Mr Weiss requested to be named special counsel, which requires him to file a report at the conclusion of the investigation.

The younger Biden investigation has become a central focus of House Republicans and Trump, who has seized upon it as a counter to his own legal woes.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy said on Tuesday that the House would proceed with a formal impeachment investigation focused on whether President Biden and his family benefited from what Republicans have contended were corrupt activities by his son.

No evidence has surfaced publicly implicating the President in any wrongdoing.

The Justice Department has been investigating Biden since 2018. Despite looking into an array of matters – including his work for Burisma, his ties to oligarchs and his business deals in China – the investigation ultimately narrowed to the questions about Biden’s taxes and the gun purchase.

Those charges, while serious, were far less explosive than the ones pushed by Trump and congressional Republicans, who have been angry with the Justice Department for failing to find wider criminal wrongdoing by the President’s son and family. NYTIMES