WILMINGTON, Delaware — For the first time in American history, the son of a sitting president is set to go on trial — twice — as Hunter Biden faces gun charges next week and tax charges in September.

The two federal judges who will preside over the criminal trials — Maryellen Noreika of Wilmington, Delaware, and Mark Scarsi of Los Angeles — have a lot in common. Both are former President Donald Trump appointees who got the nods of their home senators in blue states. Both have overseen few trials in their short time on the bench — and based on their limited records, they appear to be tough sentencers.

And both, in an odd coincidence, spent their years in private practice specializing in a relatively obscure corner of the legal profession: patent law. That final similarity suggests that the two judges share a technical eye for detail and, as young lawyers, chose a relatively apolitical area of the law.

Soon, however, both Noreika and Scarsi will each be supervising the most politically charged case of their career. On Monday, Noreika will gavel in the trial on charges that Biden illegally bought a gun as a drug user. In Los Angeles, Judge Mark Scarsi will oversee proceedings where Biden is accused of failing to pay his taxes between 2016 and 2019. The tax case had been slated to begin June 20 but was recently postponed until Sept. 5.

Noreika and Scarsi have less than 10 years of judicial experience between them. Each has presided over just a handful of criminal trials, according to a POLITICO review of the two judges’ criminal dockets. But both jurists have handled cases that have echoes of Biden’s. Scarsi has sentenced people to years in prison for violating tax laws. And when Noreika sentenced a defendant for a gun charge similar to Biden’s, she was even more punitive than prosecutors had hoped.

Before all that, Noreika and Scarsi both worked for law firms as intellectual property lawyers, representing corporations in disputes involving patents. The fact that Biden’s judges are both former patent lawyers isn’t a coincidence. These specialists can be attractive judicial nominees when support from both parties is required due to the Senate’s “blue slip” rule, which allows home-state senators to block nominees from their state.

Patent lawyers deal with complex, scientific subject matter and they often have distinctive credentials (Noreika has a Master’s in biology; Scarsi once worked as an engineer). Compared to prosecutors or public interest lawyers, they’re unlikely to have done politically contentious work. That background makes them ideal for a low-drama confirmation process, even if it would seem to leave them less-than-well-prepared to handle high-profile criminal proceedings like Biden’s.

Judge Noreika: A meticulous judge who ‘kept a tight ship’

Based on POLITICO’s review, Noreika hasn’t overseen proceedings involving the charges Biden faces: illegally possessing a gun as a drug user, and lying on a government form when he bought it by claiming he didn’t use illegal drugs. But she recently handled a case that covered similar ground.

On May 2, 2024, Noreika sentenced a man for lying on government forms about his address when he bought guns at Delaware gun stores. The defendant, Zhi Dong, pleaded guilty, admitting he had claimed to live in Delaware when he actually lived in Maryland. Prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo that he drove the guns to California and delivered them to a gun store there, which was “indicative of trafficking firearms.” But it was Dong’s first offense, they noted, and he wasn’t “the brains of the operation.” They asked Noreika to give him six months in prison.

Instead, she gave him a year.

“When you see a judge who is willing to basically double the sentencing recommendation of the prosecution, then that’s a little bit concerning, obviously, for any defense attorney,” said Peter Tilem, a Manhattan defense lawyer who has handled multiple gun cases.

At the same time, he said, there are important differences between Dong and Biden’s cases. The federal sentencing guidelines recommend higher sentences for crimes involving three or more guns, and Biden allegedly bought only one. There’s also been no suggestion that the gun Biden bought is linked to any other crime.

Noreika, who was appointed to the bench in 2018, oversaw one of her first criminal trials in August 2023. (In the federal system, the vast majority of criminal cases are resolved through plea deals before they reach trial.) It was a complex case involving charges against four defendants for running an internet fraud scheme. Three defendants pleaded guilty, and the fourth, Olugbenga Lawal, went to trial and was convicted.

One of Lawal’s lawyers, Richard Sparaco, told POLITICO that he wouldn’t have guessed Noreika’s experience was so limited. He said her knowledge of the rules of evidence was “unparalleled.”

“She kept a tight ship, which I like, because it keeps things moving and it doesn’t put the jury to sleep,” he added.

The trial had a tense moment, he said, when Noreika criticized a prosecutor for failing to correctly provide exhibits for her review.

“She did raise her voice and created a total silence in the courtroom because she came down on the assistant U.S. attorney for not crossing his T’s and dotting his I’s,” Sparaco said. “It wasn’t a major faux pas; it was something that was just a clerical error, probably. There may have been a thousand exhibits in the case, binders and binders of exhibits, and it was maybe a couple of them that were not electronically submitted to the judge. And it caused quite a bit of a stir.”

Noreika’s focus on technical details shouldn’t be a surprise, given her patent law background.

Maggie Abdo-Gomez, a former IRS lawyer who now handles tax cases in private practice, described patent lawyers this way: “Very methodical, very detailed, very ‘You gotta go A, B, C, D, you can’t skip a step.’ Is that good or bad? I don’t know. But it’s that hyper-technicality that scientists tend to have.”

On April 12, 2024, in another detail-heavy episode, Noreika rejected a motion to dismiss filed by Hunter Biden’s team. That motion argued that prosecutors entered a contract with the president’s son in July 2023 when they signed a pretrial diversion agreement promising not to charge him for a variety of issues — including anything related to the alleged gun purchase. Noreika dismissed the motion in part because the diversion agreement had a line for a probation officer to sign — and the probation officer didn’t sign it.

Sol Wisenberg, a former federal prosecutor, said that analysis, which Biden’s team is challenging on appeal, is what you’d expect from a meticulous patent lawyer.

“They really look at language,” he said. “They’re used to looking at contracts.”

Judge Scarsi: Experience with a newsworthy defendant

Scarsi, nominated by Trump in January 2020 and confirmed nine months later, handled a recent guilty plea that has echoes of Biden’s upcoming tax case. On Feb. 13, 2023, he sentenced a business owner to two years in prison for filing false tax returns and failing to pay the IRS more than $1.6 million over five years.

Scarsi also ordered the defendant, Liang Tai Chen, to pay restitution, which indicates he had not squared up his balance with the IRS at the time of sentencing (his lawyer did not respond to a comment request on this detail). Biden, similarly, faces charges of willfully failing to pay $1.5 million in taxes over four years. An important apparent distinction between Chen and Biden: The president’s son paid his outstanding taxes in full, plus penalties and interest, years ago, according to his lawyers.

Still, Chen’s two-year prison sentence would raise any defense lawyer’s eyebrows.

“I would be concerned with that one,” said Abdo-Gomez, the former IRS lawyer.

Perhaps a slightly better sign for Biden: Last year, Scarsi oversaw a trial on charges that the defendant helped prepare a false tax return. The defendant was convicted, and prosecutors sought an 18-month prison sentence. Scarsi handed down 12 months.

Based on a review of cases assigned to Scarsi and cataloged on the legal database CourtListener, he has presided over four criminal trials, with a fifth now underway involving a defendant charged with embezzling from a bankruptcy estate. His first was a four-day bench trial in December of 2021. His second also lasted four days, and ended with the conviction of a post office clerk for processing money orders in a way that defrauded the Postal Service. Scarsi sentenced her to six months and ordered her to pay $111,016 in restitution.

Biden’s tax case won’t be Scarsi’s first time handling a case in which the defendant is a public figure. On Feb. 14, 2022, he sentenced actor Zachary Joseph Horwitz, who had a number of minor film roles using the stage name Zach Avery, to 20 years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme that netted him more than $230 million. The case and its lengthy sentence drew significant media attention.

Michael Kwasigroch, a California criminal defense lawyer who represented a defendant in Scarsi’s most recent trial, said he found him fair and professional — even though the judge ruled against him numerous times throughout the proceedings.

“I was pleasantly surprised at Judge Scarsi’s demeanor, his consideration for my client and our arguments,” he said. “Bluntly, I’d try a case in front of him any time.”