Hallie Biden walked briskly to the witness stand, past her brother-in-law and ex-boyfriend Hunter Biden, to recount a brief, troubled relationship that ended in torment, her own addiction and, ultimately, his prosecution.
Ms. Biden, 50, is by far the prosecution’s most important witness. She is one of the few people with the knowledge necessary to provide a detailed and intimate account of Mr. Biden’s all-consuming addiction to crack cocaine in the fall of 2018, according to a gun purchase form in October 2018 and the illegal possession of the gun.
Shortly after sitting down, she delivered the biggest blow yet to Mr. Biden’s defense, confirming that he had bought and smoked crack cocaine in the 48 hours after he bought a gun in Delaware.
But if the purpose of her appearance was to nail down a dry, punitive timeline, the effect on Ms. Biden was to force a recovering addict to revisit days of despair and shame. She was visibly shaken by the task and kept scanning the visitors’ gallery for friendly faces during the breaks in her testimony.
“It was a terrible experience that I went through,” she said.
The defendant nodded almost imperceptibly in agreement as she spoke.
Ms. Biden — in nervous, staccato bursts — admitted to the jury that she smoked crack after President Biden’s youngest son introduced her to the drug in the summer of 2018. They briefly lived in a house in Annapolis, Maryland, when both were still suffered from the deaths of her husband and his brother Beau Biden from brain cancer in 2015.
The texts between the two were shocking. The lead prosecutor in the case, Leo J. Wise, who normally speaks in a leisurely, loud rhythm, appeared to lower his voice and speed up his speech to understand their raw, frantic conversations.
The exchange veered between accusations and affection, with Ms. Biden begging him to get treatment and not cheat on her as he scoured the streets for drugs.
And there were lots of drugs. She said Mr Biden bought several crack bricks in Washington, where he had an apartment – some the size of “ping-pong balls or maybe larger” – and kept them in his “backpack or car”.
Two transactions appeared particularly damaging to Mr. Biden’s defense, which rests on the claim that he was not on drugs at the time he signed the federal verification form to purchase a Colt handgun in Wilmington on Oct. 12, 2018.
The day after, he texted Ms. Biden that he was “buying.” That suggested he was buying crack, she told the court.
In a second message late on the evening of Oct. 14, Mr. Biden admitted that he “slept on a car” and “smoked crack” behind the minor league ballpark in Wilmington after buying drugs from a dealer named Mookie .
It was part of an erratic pattern of behavior, she added, saying that he was unavailable for weeks and that she or her children searched his car for drugs or alcohol to help him “start over and deal with things.” when he showed up at her house exhausted.
On Oct. 23, 2018 — 11 days after Mr. Biden purchased the gun — Ms. Biden confiscated the gun, drove it to a luxury supermarket in Delaware and threw it in a trash can, hoping he would never find out who owned it had taken it.
But it was quickly retrieved by police who contacted her, triggering a series of panicked messages from Mr Biden. He seemed to have immediately understood the dire implications. According to the texts, he insulted her and called her stupid.
“I take the blame,” replied Ms. Biden, who had repeatedly urged him to go to rehab and appeared to view her actions as some kind of intervention. “I don’t want to live like that.”
One of the most damaging aspects of her testimony, which came on the fourth morning of Mr. Biden’s fast-moving trial, was her assertion that he took few precautions in storing the gun when it was in his possession. Abbe Lowell, Mr. Biden’s lawyer, claimed in his opening statements that Mr. Biden kept the gun in a “locker” in his truck and only took it out once during the time he owned it.
But the government produced a text message in which Ms. Biden reprimanded her then-boyfriend and told him that the box had been left open in an unlocked vehicle with “windows open.” She warned Mr. Biden that “the kids are searching your car.”
When she searched the car on October 23, she noticed “powder dust” that she assumed was “residue of crack cocaine” before finding the gun in a suitcase with a broken lock. Prosecutors then showed surveillance video that showed her throwing the gun, only to return later and frantically try to retrieve it.
“I realize now it was a stupid idea, but I was just so panicked,” she said.
Previously, Mr. Biden’s defense team had indicated that it would seek to impugn Ms. Biden’s credibility under cross-examination by introducing new text messages – some of them “suggestive” – that suggested she was accused of his infidelity and his was angry with him because of his drug abuse. His lawyers have also suggested in texts that he may have lied to Ms. Biden by claiming he was buying drugs to cover up his affairs.
At times, Mr. Biden’s web of romantic intrigue and erasure of personal boundaries bordered on the comical. At one point, he even used his estranged wife Kathleen Buhle’s cell phone number to text Ms. Biden.
“This scares me,” she wrote.
“This is Kathleen and I’m going to beat you up,” he joked.
David C. Weiss, the special counsel who opened a separate case against Mr. Biden for more serious tax crimes, has reached out to the women closest to Mr. Biden to document his drug use, including some of the most damaging episodes in Biden’s life revisiting the family’s recent history as the campaign season intensifies.
On Wednesday, two of Mr. Biden’s former romantic partners, his former wife and a former girlfriend, gave graphic testimony about his addiction to crack cocaine in the weeks and months before he applied for a gun.
Almost all of the events at issue in the trial occurred in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was out of office.
Mr. Lowell has suggested he may try to undermine Ms. Biden’s narrative.
Mr. Biden is charged with three crimes: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false statement on a federal gun application and possessing an illegally obtained gun in October 2018. If convicted, Mr. Biden faces up to 25 years in prison and a $750,000 fine. But nonviolent first-time offenders who are not accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely receive serious prison time as a result of the charge.
The government’s case centers on a relatively simple question: whether Mr. Biden was abusing drugs when he filled out the federal firearms application and claimed he was not an “unlawful user” of controlled substances. “Addiction may not be a choice, but lying and buying a gun is a choice,” Derek Hines, one of Mr. Weiss’ top deputies, told jurors in his opening statements Tuesday.
The sheer volume of unflattering evidence that Mr. Weiss has assembled is intended to prove that Mr. Biden knowingly lied when he claimed that he had not taken drugs when he purchased the pistol.
But even some critics of the Biden family believe it has gone far beyond that goal — to a publicly humiliating trial of the president’s troubled son for an offense that, while a crime, is rarely prosecuted as a standalone charge against anyone will have no criminal record and has been sober for years.
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2024-06-06 18:54:04
www.nytimes.com
