Hunter Biden’s two former romantic partners, his ex-wife and ex-girlfriend, gave vivid and poignant testimony Wednesday about his out-of-control addiction in the weeks and months before he claimed to be drug-free. in the form of federal firearms.
Telling different experiences with the son of President Biden, the two women – Kathleen Buhle, his wife of 24 years, and Zoe Kestan, whom he met in 2017 – painted a joint portrait. He portrays a family man who is both addicted and lives in New York and Los Angeles.
The third woman in Mr. Biden’s life, Hallie Biden, the widow of his late brother Beau, can be called as a witness for the prosecution from Thursday, the fourth day of Mr. Biden’s trial on charges of lying about the application to get a gun in October 2018.
Of the three, he was closest to Mr. Biden when he bought the gun, and is likely to offer the most complete accounting of the actions laid out in the indictment about whether he had lied in the Federal gun application.
David C. Weiss, the special counsel who also brought more serious tax charges against Mr. Biden in California, has approached the woman closest to Mr. Biden to document his drug use, looking back at some of the most embarrassing episodes of the Biden family. history – in the heart of the election year.
Almost all of the events at issue in the trial occurred in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, spent much of Wednesday pointing out inconsistencies in the testimony of prosecution witnesses. He also emphasized the lack of evidence in text and written exchanges from his client that Mr. Biden smoked crack cocaine during the month he filled out the gun application.
The presence of Hunter Biden’s family and friends, including Jill Biden, the first lady, who appeared for the third time on Wednesday, has emphasized how the trial must have been a painful and personal trial for the president’s family.
Mrs. Kestan’s entrance into the packed fourth floor courtroom produced one of the more awkward moments in the trial brimming with jarring juxtapositions.
When Leo J. Wise, the prosecutor who worked for Mr. Weiss, asked him to identify Hunter Biden in the courtroom for the record, he gave a disapproving wave, and a fleeting smile before looking down, head in hands.
Mrs. Kestan, a designer who has done various projects in New York with artists and textile designers, met Mr. Biden at a gentleman’s club in December 2017. The two immediately connected – “caught a feeling,” as he said – after he sat with someone in the room quiet back and clicked on a song from Fleet Foxes, an indie rock band.
When they met, Mr. Biden was 48 years old and Ms. Kestan was 24 years old — exactly half his age.
At some point, he is described as wanting to help her with various attempts to calm her down, although she says she saw him cut small crystals from a huge cracked rock, she said the size of a Ping-Pong ball.
Mrs. Kestan said that he immediately saw that he had a serious problem with drugs, having experienced firsthand the problem of addiction with people in his life. Asking him to go to rehab, he added, “is always part of the conversation.”
As the courtroom heard, Ms. Kestan provided an almost cinematic rendering of a drug party during Manhattan Fashion Week in February 2018.
He said he withdrew a large amount of money from a Wells Fargo ATM in Midtown Manhattan, sending him withdrawing money by reading a special code sent to his phone that was valid for several minutes.
“He used the cash for a lot of things, a good amount for drugs,” Ms Kestan said.
But he also gave $800 to another cause – to “buy clothes for his children” from high-end retailers.
In cross-examination, Mr. Lowell sought to challenge Ms. Kestan’s credibility, pointing out that while she encouraged Mr. Biden to stay clean, at other times she introduced him to drug dealers and helped him break his habit.
And he emphasized that when he testified that he used drugs a month before buying the Colt Cobra 38SPL revolver, Ms. Kestan was not with her in October, when she returned to Delaware to see her family.
Buhle’s earlier testimony, by contrast, showed the personal toll that Mr. Biden’s addiction has taken on his family.
In a calm, steady voice, she recounts her shock when she found a used crack pipe in an ashtray in the family’s Washington home on July 3, 2015 — and how her marriage fell apart two years later.
“He wasn’t himself” when he took the drugs, she said. He became “angry, angry” – although he tried to hide his addiction from family and friends.
Speaking with emotion, she explained how she would search the family car for evidence of her husband’s crack use before allowing her children to use the vehicle, to make sure “they don’t drive the car on drugs.”
The trial’s third day ended on a less dramatic note: prosecutors’ questions about the man who sold Hunter Biden a handgun at StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply in Wilmington, Del., a strip mall across town from the courthouse.
The salesman, Gordon Cleveland, said he approached Mr. Biden about a minute after entering the store, to ask what he was looking for. Mr. Cleveland, who works full time for the city, said he did not immediately recognize the scion of the country’s most famous family, but was impressed by Mr. Biden’s black Cadillac.
“I like guns and I like cars,” he said, in a rare moment.
Mr. Cleveland said he watched Hunter Biden answer “no” to the question at the center of this case: Are you an illegal user of, or addicted to, marijuana or a depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or other controlled substance?
Mr. Biden did not hesitate before answering or asking for any clarification, and did not appear confused by the question, he added.
Mr. Biden was charged with three felonies: defrauding a federally licensed gun dealer, making false claims on a federal firearms application and possessing an illegally obtained gun in October 2018.
If convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison and a $750,000 fine. But nonviolent first-time offenders who haven’t been accused of using a weapon in another crime rarely receive serious prison time for those charges.
He has been indicted by two federal grand juries in different jurisdictions. But House Republicans are asking the Justice Department to bring more charges against the president’s son. In a criminal referral sent on Wednesday, the chairman of three House committees recommended that Mr. Biden and his uncle James Biden be charged with making false statements to Congress during new testimony.
But other Republicans have questioned why Mr. Biden is being tried on gun charges.
“I don’t think the average American is going to be charged with a gun,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told reporters this week. “I don’t see anything good coming out of it.”
He added that, by contrast, Mr. Biden’s trial on tax-related charges in Los Angeles, scheduled to begin in September, was appropriate.
Trey Gowdy, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina who is also a federal prosecutor, suggested that the prosecution of former drug addicts who have committed to recovery sends the wrong message.
“I did gun prosecutions for six years,” he said this week during an appearance on Fox News. “I’m sure you don’t have 10 cases prosecuted nationwide of drug addicts or drug users having firearms or cheating on apps. Why are you pursuing this?”
Prosecutors working for Mr. Weiss said Hunter Biden’s accountability is essential to ensure the principle that no one is “above the law.”
Mr. Weiss, the Trump-appointed US attorney in Delaware, filed charges in the gun case after a plea deal collapsed last July.
Mr. Lowell insisted that his decision to bring the charges was the result of a Republican pressure campaign to target Hunter Biden to damage his father’s re-election campaign.
Luke Broadwater contributed reports from Washington.