Hunter Biden’s protection workforce rested on Monday in his federal firearms trial in Delaware on Monday, setting the stage for closing arguments and for the jury to start deliberating, barring any dramatic strikes.
By Monday morning, it was clear that Mr. Biden wouldn’t testify in his personal protection. All sides had hammered out jury directions with the decide and seemed to be conferring privately on different issues.
Mr. Biden, who’s President Biden’s son, was angered by the federal government’s powerful cross-examination of his daughter Naomi Biden Neal on Friday and had informed individuals in his orbit that he would take into account taking the stand. However the protection, after a weekend of consultations between Mr. Biden and his lead lawyer, Abbe Lowell, rested with out taking that dangerous step.
The federal government has sought to indicate that Mr. Biden often used medicine in 2018 and 2019 and that he falsely claimed to be drug-free when he stuffed out a federal firearms kind. His attorneys have supplied a spirited, if narrower, protection centered on whether or not Mr. Biden was really doing crack cocaine on the time he purchased the gun in October 2018 and have sought to undercut the prosecution’s witnesses by difficult their recollections.
Over two days, David C. Weiss, the particular counsel within the case, summoned three of Mr. Biden’s former romantic companions, all of whom described in painful element Mr. Biden’s unrelenting descent into crack dependancy after his brother died of mind most cancers. They included his former spouse, Kathleen Buhle; a onetime girlfriend, Zoe Kestan; and Hallie Biden, his brother’s widow with whom he had an ill-fated romantic relationship.
Ms. Biden Neal has to date been the one lady referred to as by the protection.
In emotionally uncooked testimony, she gave an upbeat evaluation of his drug use within the weeks earlier than he purchased the gun, saying he appeared “hopeful” and sober.
However below cross-examination, that declare appeared to crumble, with prosecutors introducing textual content messages from that interval that illustrated an anguished, and excruciating, relationship through which she knowledgeable her father he had pushed her to the breaking level.
Nonetheless, Ms. Biden Neal may supply solely restricted insights into the actions of Mr. Biden, who was typically absent from her life for months and erratic even after they have been in the identical metropolis.
The prosecution, which rested on Friday morning, has additionally pointed to a whole bunch of textual content messages and financial institution data, in addition to to the defendant’s personal phrases, as an instance Mr. Biden’s unyielding drug dependancy within the months earlier than and after October 2018.
Over the past week, Mr. Lowell has established that nobody noticed Mr. Biden doing crack cocaine within the month he purchased the gun. Ms. Biden Neal’s testimony didn’t change that.
However two textual content messages retrieved from Mr. Biden’s telephone have harm his protection from the beginning. Someday after he bought the gun, he despatched a textual content saying he was assembly a supplier named Mookie. A day later, he adopted as much as say that he was sleeping on a automotive and smoking crack.
The obvious admission got here to a head on Friday as Mr. Lowell questioned the prosecution’s final witness, Joshua Romig, a particular agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, who was requested to translate drug lingo launched within the authorities’s case in opposition to Mr. Biden.
Mr. Lowell made the purpose that whereas the prosecution had spent days inspecting Mr. Biden’s communications from earlier in 2018 and 2019, displaying photos of him holding a crack pipe and texts about shopping for medicine, there was nothing comparable to indicate for October 2018.
“No reference of Chore Boy?” Mr. Lowell stated to Mr. Romig, referring to phrases associated to crack use. “No point out of a ball?”
Mr. Romig responded, “Aside from the October textual content that we talked about, the place he stated he was smoking crack.”
