Hallie Biden, a former girlfriend of Hunter Biden and widow of his brother, Beau, took the stand on Thursday, telling jurors that she noticed him purchase, stash and smoke huge quantities of crack cocaine within the fall of 2018 when he claimed to be drug-free on a firearms software.
Ms. Biden — talking in nervous, clipped bursts as she confronted Mr. Biden throughout the fourth-floor courtroom — admitted that he had launched her to crack. She mentioned she was ashamed and embarrassed by their conduct when the 2 briefly lived collectively in a rented home in Annapolis, Md., a time when each had been in shock over Beau Biden’s dying.
Ms. Biden is, by far, crucial witness for the prosecution, providing probably the most detailed, and intimate, portrait of Mr. Biden’s reckless and self-destructive conduct on the time.
Mr. Biden, she mentioned, purchased a number of rocks of crack in Washington, the place he stored an residence — some the dimensions of “Ping-Pong balls, or larger perhaps” — and saved them in his “backpack or automotive.”
Earlier, Mr. Biden’s protection crew recommended that it might attempt to problem Ms. Biden’s credibility on cross-examination by introducing new textual content messages — some “salacious” — displaying that she was enraged at him over his infidelity and drug abuse.
David C. Weiss, the particular counsel who has introduced a separate case towards Mr. Biden involving extra severe tax offenses, has turned to the ladies closest to Mr. Biden to doc his drug use, revisiting among the most damaging episodes within the Biden household’s current historical past because the marketing campaign season intensifies.
Ms. Biden, who was closest to Mr. Biden when he purchased the gun, is prone to supply probably the most full accounting of actions specified by his indictment over his declare to have been drug-free when he utilized for a gun.
On Wednesday, two of Hunter Biden’s former romantic companions, his ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend, offered vivid and gut-wrenching testimony about his habit to crack within the weeks and months earlier than he claimed to be drug-free on a federal firearms type.
Nearly all of the occasions at subject within the trial occurred in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was out of workplace.
A lawyer for Hunter Biden, Abbe Lowell, has recommended he might search to undercut Ms. Biden’s narrative. In his opening assertion on Tuesday, he drew a pointy distinction within the dealing with of the gun. In the course of the 11 days that Mr. Biden owned the firearm, he by no means loaded it, by no means eliminated it from its lock field in his truck and by no means used it, Mr. Lowell mentioned. It was his girlfriend on the time, Ms. Biden, who discovered the gun, eliminated it from the field, positioned it in a pouch that contained drug residue and tossed it in a trash can.
Mr. Biden is charged with three felonies: mendacity to a federally licensed gun seller, making a false declare on the federal firearms software and possessing an illegally obtained gun in October 2018. If convicted, Mr. Biden might withstand 25 years in jail and $750,000 in fines. However nonviolent first-time offenders who haven’t been accused of utilizing the weapon in one other crime hardly ever obtain severe jail time for the fees.
The federal government’s case activates a comparatively simple query: whether or not Mr. Biden was abusing medication when he crammed out the federal firearms software claiming he was not an “illegal consumer” of managed substances. “Habit might not be a selection, however mendacity and shopping for a gun is a selection,” Derek Hines, a prime deputy to Mr. Weiss, advised jurors in opening statements on Tuesday.
The sheer quantity of unflattering proof assembled by Mr. Weiss is meant to show that Mr. Biden knowingly lied when he claimed to not be taking medication when he purchased the handgun. Nevertheless it has, within the view of even some Biden household critics, moved far past that aim — right into a publicly humiliating trial of the president’s troubled son for an offense that, whereas against the law, is seldom prosecuted as a stand-alone cost for somebody with no prior prison report who has been sober for years.
