Harley Biden briskly walked to the witness stand past her brother-in-law and ex-boyfriend Hunter Biden, documenting the bitterness, her own addictions and a fraught relationship that ultimately ended in his criminal indictment.
Mrs. Biden (50 years old) is by far the government’s most important witness. She is one of the few people who can provide a detailed and intimate account of Mr. Biden’s crack cocaine addiction. He is on trial for lying about his drug use on a gun purchase form in October 2018 and illegal possession of a weapon.
Shortly after Biden took his seat, prosecutors dealt the biggest blow to Mr. Biden’s defense with a series of texts showing that he had purchased and smoked crack within 48 hours of purchasing a gun in Delaware. I decided that
The testimony was intended to establish a clear prosecution timeline, but Mr. Biden’s lawyers later undermined it. But it also had the effect of forcing Ms. Biden, a recovering addict, to revisit days of her despair and her shame, so traumatizing that her memories seemed to fade. She was clearly shocked, and repeatedly scanned her gallery to find her new husband’s face among the gawking reporters.
“What I went through was a terrible experience,” said Ms. Biden, a former school counselor.
“I’m embarrassed, I’m embarrassed, and I regret that part of my life.”
The defendant nodded almost imperceptibly as he spoke.
Mrs. Biden admitted, in a nervous, short voice, that she started smoking crack after the president’s youngest son introduced her to it in the summer of 2018, but quit a few months later. At the time, the couple was still reeling from the death of her husband and his younger brother, Beau Biden, from a brain tumor in 2015.
The text was shocking. The lead prosecutor on the case, Leo J. Wise, who usually speaks at a high, unhurried volume, seemed to lower his voice and rush his delivery to read emotionally raw, passionate dialogue.
The conversation vacillated between criticism and affection, with Mrs. Biden often pleading with him to get him treatment while she wandered the streets all night looking for drugs.
And there were a lot of drugs. According to her, Mr. Biden bought several cracked rocks in Washington, maintained an apartment “the size of a ping-pong ball or larger,” and stored them in his “backpack or car.”
Two transactions seemed particularly damaging to Biden’s defense, which argued that he was not under the influence of drugs when he signed a federal screening form to purchase a Colt handgun in Wilmington on Oct. 12, 2018. It is based on
The next day, he texted Biden, saying, “I’ll buy it.” That meant he was buying drugs, she told the court.
In a second message from late at night on Oct. 14, Mr. Biden sought out a local dealer named Mookie and texted him that he was “sleeping in his car” and “smoking a cigarette” behind a minor league ballpark in Wilmington. .
She said this was part of a pattern of erratic behavior and he would be unavailable for weeks at a time, and she or her children would search his car for drugs or alcohol to help him “get a fresh start and deal with his problems”. He added that it would be a struggle. When he showed up again at her house exhausted.
Under subsequent cross-examination, she said she had never directly seen him smoking a cigarette in October 2018, an important admission from the defense’s perspective.
Ms. Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, cautiously but forcefully disputed Ms. Biden’s reliability on confirmation of the government’s schedule, asking her dozens of questions about her specific recollection of events before and after the gun purchase.
More often than not she answered, “I don’t remember.”
“There are some things I remember, but there are a lot of things I don’t,” he said.
Mr. Lowell did not directly dispute the veracity of the texts, but suggested that his client may have lied to Mr. Biden to cover up his affairs. There were times, she said, when Mrs. Biden said she was somewhere but she actually wasn’t.
On October 23, 2018, 11 days after Biden purchased the gun, a panicked Biden discovered the weapon, drove to an upscale supermarket in Delaware and threw it in the trash. He took it.
Soon after, he discovered it missing from his truck, sending Mr. Biden into a series of disturbing communications whose dire implications he seemed to grasp immediately. According to the text, he cursed her Mr. Biden and called her an idiot. He told her to go back to her store and get it out of her bin.
Prosecutors showed surveillance footage showing her throwing away the gun, but returning 30 minutes later and desperately trying to retrieve it.
“Now I know it was a stupid idea, but I was so embarrassed.” She said this on Thursday, reiterating a text message she sent Biden the day she threw it away.
But before the retiree, who frequently rummaged through trash cans for recycling, could find the weapon, he found the discarded gun and supplies together and took them home. Mrs. Biden called the police and filed her report.
“I will take responsibility.” Mrs. Biden said to Mr. Biden: She repeatedly urged him to go to her rehab and seemed to view her own actions as some kind of intervention. “I don’t want to live like this.”
Mr. Lowell claimed in his opening statement that Mr. Biden stored the gun in a “lock box” in his truck and took it out only once during the time he owned it. But Mrs. Biden took few precautions when she stored her guns, she claimed.
Prosecutors presented a text in which Biden scolded him for leaving it in the open console of his truck with the lock open and “windows rolled down.” She warned Biden: “Kids search your car.”
At times, Mr. Biden’s web of romantic intrigue and disappearance of personal boundaries bordered on the comical. On Wednesday her ex-girlfriend explained how she regularly loses her phone. In October 2018, he was using his ex-wife’s cell phone. When he texted Biden from that phone, she responded, “That’s amazing.”
He joked, “This is Kathleen and I’m going to beat you up.” (His ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, discovered that her husband and Mrs. Biden were having an affair before their divorce.)
Thursday marked the first time Jill Biden was not in court after briefly joining her husband in France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day before leaving the country hours later. President Biden was asked in an interview with ABC whether he would “rule out” pardoning his son. “Yes,” he answered.
David C. Weiss, a special prosecutor who has filed a separate lawsuit against Mr. Biden related to more serious tax violations, has asked women closest to Mr. Biden to document his drug use and report that he Some of the more damaging episodes were revisited. The family’s recent history as campaign season intensifies.
On Wednesday, two of Biden’s former romantic partners, his ex-wife and his ex-girlfriend, gave graphic testimony about his drug 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. was away.
Mr. Biden was charged with three felonies, including lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on a federal gun application, and possessing an illegally obtained gun. If convicted, Biden could face up to 25 years in prison and a fine of $750,000. However, nonviolent first-time offenders who have not been charged with using a weapon in another crime rarely face serious prison time for their charges.
The government’s case concerns the relatively simple question of whether Biden abused drugs when he filled out his federal gun application, claiming he was not an “illegal user” of controlled substances.
The government has been careful not to mention Biden’s addiction and to use details about his drug use to hold him accountable for saying he did not use drugs on his forms.
The vast amount of disturbing evidence Mr. Weiss has collected is intended to prove that Mr. Biden knowingly lied when he claimed he was not on drugs when he purchased the handgun.
In the view of some Biden family critics, it has gone far beyond that goal and devolved into a publicly humiliating trial for the president’s troubled son. Although it is a crime, it is rarely prosecuted as an independent charge. No prior criminal record, having been sober for several years.
But Mrs. Biden, who first met Beau and Hunter Biden when they were middle school students in Delaware, is not just a witness in someone else’s trial.
Like Mr. Biden, she had to continue fighting even after the death of her husband, who was seen by everyone, especially his father and brother, as the bearer of the family legacy. Her testimony came days after the ninth anniversary of Beau Biden’s death.
And like her brother-in-law, she has been sober for years.
Late Thursday she appeared exhausted and struggled to follow the tangled threads of evidence woven by her questioners.
But she brightened when Ms. Wise pointed out that her new husband, whom she married last weekend, was in the courtroom to dispel any notion that she was being coached by someone in the gallery.
Mr. Wise asked. Why was he there?
“Please support me.” Mrs. Biden said with a smile, raising her fist.
