Hunter Biden’s defense team rested Monday in his federal firearms trial in Delaware, setting the stage for closing arguments and for the jury to begin reaching a verdict, barring any dramatic developments.
By Monday morning, it was clear Biden would not testify in his own defense, and both sides were finalizing instructions for the judge and jury and appeared to be discussing other matters privately.
President Biden’s son, incensed by the government’s tough cross-examination of his daughter, Naomi Biden Neal, on Friday had signaled to others that he would consider taking the stand, but the defense rested before taking that risky step after a weekend of discussions between Biden and his lead lawyer, Abe Lowell.
The government has been trying to prove that Biden used drugs regularly in 2018 and 2019 and that he falsely represented himself as drug free when he filled out a federal firearms application. Biden’s defense team has mounted a narrow but vigorous defense centered on whether Biden was in fact using crack cocaine at the time he purchased the gun in October 2018, and has sought to undermine prosecution witnesses by challenging their recollections.
Over two days, David C. Weiss, the special prosecutor in the case, called three of Biden’s former lovers, all of whom described in harrowing detail how Biden’s relentless slide into crack addiction after his brother died of brain cancer. They included his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhl, his one-time girlfriend Zoe Kestan, and Hallie Biden, the widow of Biden’s brother and with whom he had an ill-fated relationship.
So far, Biden Neal is the only woman called by the defense.
In emotionally explicit testimony, she offered an optimistic assessment of her husband’s drug use in the weeks before he bought the gun, saying he seemed “hopeful” and sober.
But that argument appeared to fall apart under cross-examination, with the prosecution presenting text messages from the time that showed a tortured and unbearable relationship in which she told him her father had pushed her to breaking point.
Still, Biden Neal was often absent from her life for months at a time and was able to offer limited insight into Biden’s behavior, which can be mercurial even when they’re in the same city.
Prosecutors, who adjourned court on Friday morning, pointed to hundreds of text messages, bank records and even the defendant’s own words to show Biden’s relentless drug addiction over the months around October 2018.
Lowell established last week that no one had seen Biden take crack cocaine in the month he bought his guns, and Biden-Neal’s testimony did nothing to change that.
But two text messages recovered from Biden’s phone damaged his defense from the start: The day after he bought the gun, he texted that he was meeting with a dealer named Mookie. The next day, he went on to say that he was sleeping in his car and smoking crack cocaine.
The admission culminated Friday when Lowell questioned the prosecution’s final witness, Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Joshua Romig, who had been asked to translate drug-related jargon used in the government’s case against Biden.
Lowell noted that prosecutors spent days going through Biden’s communications from early 2018 and 2019, showing photos of him holding a crack pipe and emails about buying drugs, but they showed nothing comparable from October 2018.
“Nothing mentioned about Choa Boy?” Mr. Lowell said to Mr. Romig, referring to the terminology used for crack. “Nothing mentioned about the ball?”
“The exception to that is the email we spoke to in October, where he says he smokes crack cocaine,” Romig responded.
