Hunter Biden’s daughter Naomi Biden Neal took the stand on Friday in hopes of taking her father’s protection into her personal palms. By the point she embraced him on the defendant’s desk after an hour of emotionally uncooked testimony, it was unclear whether or not she helped or harmed his trigger.
Ms. Biden Neal, 30, instructed the court docket her father appeared “hopeful” and sober weeks earlier than he claimed to be drug-free on a gun software on the coronary heart of the federal government’s case. However that upbeat evaluation was shortly undercut by prosecutors, who launched anguished texts from that interval during which she instructed her father he had pushed her to the breaking level.
“I’m actually sorry, dad, I can’t take this,” Ms. Biden Neal wrote in October 2018, after he had failed to answer a number of of her messages after they had been each in New York.
“I don’t know what to say, I simply miss you a lot,” she mentioned. “I simply need to hang around with you.”
The dramatic testimony by Ms. Biden Neal — somber, clad in black and nagged by a nervous cough — capped the primary week of Mr. Biden’s trial on costs that he falsely claimed to be sober on an software to purchase a handgun on Oct. 12 in Delaware.
The federal government’s purpose is to show Mr. Biden was utilizing medication often in 2018 and 2019 and knowingly falsified the shape. His legal professionals have provided a spirited, if narrower, protection centered on questioning whether or not Mr. Biden was really utilizing medication in October 2018 and difficult the recollection of the prosecution’s witnesses.
Over the previous couple of days, David C. Weiss, the particular counsel within the case, summoned three girls with painful, intimate experiences with Mr. Biden’s descent into crack and alcohol after the 2015 loss of life of his brother: his former spouse, Kathleen Buhle; a onetime girlfriend, Zoe Kestan; and Hallie Biden, the widow of his brother, Beau Biden, with whom he had an ill-fated romantic relationship.
Ms. Biden Neal has been the one lady referred to as by the protection, led by the veteran protection lawyer Abbe Lowell.
Ms. Biden Neal, who works as a lawyer in Washington, had been keen to assist out her father, who she believes is the goal of a politically motivated prosecution, in accordance with folks aware of the scenario. Even when issues had gone extra easily, she may supply solely restricted insights into the actions of Mr. Biden, who was usually absent from her life for months and erratic even after they had been in the identical metropolis.
Mr. Lowell guided her by way of a collection of mild questions throughout a direct examination that lasted 11 minutes as she sought to bolster the protection’s rivalry that her father was working onerous to kick his habit to crack cocaine and alcohol within the weeks main as much as his gun buy.
After having lunch with him in Los Angeles in August 2018, Ms. Biden Neal concluded that he was “the clearest” she had seen him since her uncle’s loss of life three years earlier, she instructed the court docket.
“He appeared nice; he appeared hopeful,” she recalled.
However underneath an intense cross-examination, her declare appeared to crumble.
Simply three months later, in mid-October 2018, Mr. Biden visited New York Metropolis, the place his daughter was getting into her second 12 months of regulation college and transferring in together with her boyfriend.
The federal government produced a number of textual content exchanges that urged he was not in place.
Mr. Biden ignored Ms. Biden Neal’s determined texts for hours and made a weird request when he did resurface, round 2 a.m. “Are you up? Please name me,” he wrote to his daughter. He wished her boyfriend to convey him his truck, which the couple had borrowed, to Midtown Manhattan from Brooklyn.
Later that day, Ms. Biden Neal and her father exchanged extra texts, making an attempt to rearrange handing off the keys. She had hoped to see him, however that was wanting unlikely.
“So no c u!?” she texted him on Oct. 18, including a sad-face emoji.
Mr. Biden responded, “I’m sorry, I’ve been so unreachable, it’s not truthful to you.”
They did see one another the following day. However she later admitted their encounters had been usually fleeting, lasting not more than an hour or two.
Ms. Biden Neal was subdued as she sat within the witness field, glumly studying a sheaf of her texts printed out by the prosecution. She mentioned she did “not recall” sending them when requested to clarify her frame of mind, noting that her fundamental recollection of these days was how tough it was for the 2 of them to attach.
Her father seemed to be preventing tears as she spoke.
After stepping down from the stand, Ms. Biden Neal walked over to her father, who was on the protection desk, and embraced him earlier than they exited the courtroom collectively.
The prosecution, which rested on Friday morning, has gone to nice size — by way of witness testimony, a whole lot of contemporaneous textual content messages and financial institution data, in addition to the defendant’s personal phrases — for instance that Mr. Biden spiraled by way of an unrelenting habit to crack cocaine within the months earlier than and after October 2018.
Over the course of the week, Mr. Lowell has established that nobody noticed Mr. Biden doing crack cocaine in October 2018, the month he purchased the gun. Ms. Biden Neal’s testimony on Friday didn’t change that.
However two textual content messages retrieved from Mr. Biden’s telephone have been hurting his protection from the beginning. Sooner or later after he bought the gun, he despatched a textual content saying he was assembly a vendor named Mookie. A day later, he adopted as much as say that he was sleeping on a automotive and smoking crack.
The obvious admission got here to a head as Mr. Lowell questioned the prosecution’s final witness, Joshua Romig, a particular agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, who was requested to translate drug lingo launched within the authorities’s case towards Mr. Biden.
Mr. Lowell made the purpose that whereas the prosecution has spent days analyzing Mr. Biden’s communications earlier in 2018 and in 2019, displaying photos of him holding a crack pipe and texts about shopping for medication, there was nothing comparable to point out for October 2018.
“No reference of Chore Boy?” Mr. Lowell mentioned to Mr. Romig. “No point out of a ball?”
Mr. Romig responded, “Excluding the October textual content that we talked about, the place he mentioned he was smoking crack.”
The trial has served as a vivid reminder of a harrowing drama that has performed out within the Biden household for years, underlined by the presence of family and friends of Mr. Biden’s within the courtroom daily. The primary woman, Jill Biden, flew again from France on Thursday to retake her seat within the entrance row behind the protection counsel desk on Friday.
The case facilities on a reasonably easy query: whether or not Mr. Biden lied on Oct. 12, 2018, when he marked “no” in answering a selected query on a federal gun software. It requested, “Are you an illegal consumer of, or hooked on, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or some other managed substance?”
Mr. Biden is charged with three felonies: mendacity to a federally licensed gun vendor, making a false declare on the federal firearms software and possessing an illegally obtained gun. If convicted, he may withstand 25 years in jail and $750,000 in fines. However nonviolent first-time offenders who haven’t been accused of utilizing the weapon in one other crime hardly ever obtain critical jail time for the fees.
It was unclear on Friday what number of extra witnesses, if any, the protection deliberate to name on Monday.
