Hallie Biden walked quickly to the witness box, passing her brother-in-law and ex-boyfriend Hunter Biden, to tell the story of her relationship with the star that ended in anger, her addiction and, finally, the criminal prosecution.
Biden, 50, is the government’s most important witness. He is one of the few who can provide a detailed, and intimate, account of Mr. Biden’s addiction to crack cocaine. He was tried on charges of lying about drug use on a form to buy a gun in October 2018, and illegal possession of a weapon.
Moments after he sat down, prosecutors delivered what they considered the strongest blow to Mr. Biden’s defense, in a series of texts that showed he bought and smoked a gun within 48 hours of buying it in Delaware.
The testimony was intended to flesh out the prosecution’s clear timeline, which Mr. Biden’s lawyers later undermined. But it also had the effect of forcing Ms. Biden, a recovering addict, to revisit the days of desperation and shame, so traumatic that he seems to remember them. She was clearly shaken, repeatedly scanning the gallery for her new husband’s face among the laughing reporters.
“It was the worst experience I’ve ever had,” said Biden, a former school counselor.
“I’m ashamed and embarrassed, and I regret that part of my life.”
The defendant nodded, almost imperceptibly, as he spoke.
Mrs. Biden – speaking nervously and explosively – admitted he smoked crack after President Biden’s youngest son introduced the drug in the summer of 2018, before quitting a few months later. At the time, the two were still reeling from the death of their husband and brother, Beau Biden, from brain cancer in 2015.
The texts are wrenching. The lead prosecutor in the case, Leo J. Wise, who normally speaks in an unhurried, high-volume cadence, seemed to lower his voice and quickly deliver an emotional and frantic reading of the conversation.
The exchange alternates between recrimination and affection, with Ms. Biden asked him to seek treatment while he trawled the streets, often all night, for drugs.
And there are many drugs. Mr Biden, he said, bought several cracked rocks in Washington, where he kept his apartment – the size of a “Ping-Pong ball, or bigger” – and kept them in “a backpack or car”.
Two transactions appear to have particularly damaged Mr. Biden’s defense, which was predicated on his claim that he was not taking drugs when he signed a federal screening form to buy a Colt pistol in Wilmington on October 12, 2018.
The day after, he texted Biden that he was “buying it.” That showed he was buying crack, he told the court.
In a second message, from late on the night of October 14, Mr. Biden texted that he was “sleeping in the car” and “smoking a cigarette” behind a minor league baseball stadium in Wilmington, after looking for a local dealer named Mookie.
It was part of a pattern of erratic behavior, she added, saying she would be unreachable for weeks at a time and she or her children would look for drugs or alcohol in the car to help them “start over and deal with things ” when he looked tired again in his house.
Later, in cross-examination, he said he never witnessed him smoking in October 2018, an important admission for the defense team.
Mr. Biden’s defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, cautiously but forcefully challenged Biden’s credibility to verify the government’s timeline, asking several dozen questions about his specific recollection of events before and after the gun purchase.
They answer with “I don’t remember” more often than not.
“There are some things you remember, but a lot you don’t,” he said.
While Mr. Lowell did not directly challenge the veracity of the text, he suggested that his client may have lied to Ms. Biden to cover up her affair. Biden said there were times when he would have told them he was somewhere, but in fact he wasn’t.
On October 23, 2018 – 11 days after Mr. Biden bought the gun – a panicked Mrs. Biden found the weapon, drove it to Delaware’s top supermarket and threw it in the trash, hoping no one would find her. has been taken.
Not long after, he saw the truck disappear, prompting some worried communications from Mr. Biden, who seemed to immediately understand the dire implications. He cursed Ms. Biden and called him an idiot, according to the text. He told her to go back to the store and ask him to get out of the bin.
Prosecutors then showed surveillance video of him throwing the gun away only to return it half an hour later and frantically try to retrieve it.
“I know right now it’s a stupid idea, but I’m really panicking,” she said on Thursday, echoing a text message Mr. Biden sent when he threw up.
But before he found the weapon, a retiree who often sifted through trash cans for recyclables found discarded guns and supplies and took them home. Biden called the police and filed a report.
“I’ll take the blame,” Biden told Mr. Biden. “I don’t want to live like this.” He has repeatedly asked her to go to rehab and appears to be acting as an interventionist.
Mr. Lowell insisted in his opening statement that Mr. Biden kept the gun in a “lock box” in his truck and took it only once when he had it. But Ms. Biden claimed that he took some precautions to store the gun.
Prosecutors produced texts from Mrs Biden accusing her of being left in the open console of the truck, which was unlocked and with the “windows down”. He warned Mr. Biden that “the kids are looking for your car.”
At times, Mr. Biden’s web of romantic intrigue and breaking down personal boundaries bordered on comic. On Wednesday, the ex-girlfriend explained how she often lost her cell phone. In October 2018, he used a phone that belonged to his ex-husband. When he texted Biden from the phone, he replied, “That surprised me.”
He joked, “This is Kathleen and I’m going to beat you.” (His ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, discovered her husband and Ms. Biden were having an affair before the divorce.)
Thursday was the first time Jill Biden, who briefly joined her husband in France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day before departing hours later, was not in the courtroom. In an interview with ABC, President Biden was asked if he would “refuse” to pardon his son. “Yes,” he replied.
David C. Weiss, the special counsel who brought a separate case against Mr. Biden involving more serious tax violations, has asked the women closest to Mr. Biden to document his drug use, revisiting some of Biden’s most damaging episodes. the new history of the family as the season of the campaign intensifies.
On Wednesday, two of Mr. Biden’s former romantic partners, his ex-wife and ex-girlfriend, testified vividly about his addiction in the weeks and months before he applied for the gun.
Almost all of the events at issue in the trial occurred in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Biden is charged with three felonies: defrauding a federally licensed gun dealer, making false claims on a federal firearms application and possessing an illegally obtained gun. If convicted, Mr. Biden 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.
The government’s case turns on a rather straightforward question: whether Mr. Biden abused drugs when he filled out a federal firearms application claiming he was not an “unlawful user” of a controlled substance.
The administration has been careful not to call Mr. Biden a drug addict, but instead used details about his drug use to impeach him because he said he was drug-free on the form.
The overwhelming amount of evidence gathered by Mr. Weiss is intended to prove that Mr. Biden deliberately lied when he claimed he was not using drugs when he bought the pistol.
It has, despite some critics of the Biden family, gone beyond that goal – becoming a trial that humiliated the president’s troubled son for an offense that, although a crime, is rarely prosecuted as an independent accusation against the victim. no prior criminal record have been sober for years.
But Ms. Biden, who first met Beau and Hunter Biden when they were in high school in Delaware, isn’t just a witness in someone else’s court.
Like Mr. Biden, he had to soldier on after the death of his wife, who was seen by everyone, especially his father and sister, as the bearer of the family legacy. Her testimony comes days after the ninth anniversary of Beau Biden’s death.
And like his sister, he has been around for years.
Late Thursday he appeared exhausted and struggling to follow the threads of evidence presented by the interrogators.
But he brightened when Mr. Wise – to dispel any notion that he was being coached by someone in the gallery – pointed out that his new wife, whom he married only last weekend, was in the courtroom.
Mr. Wise asked: Why are you there?
“Support,” Ms. Biden said, smiling, raising her fist.