Two of Hunter Biden’s former romantic partners, his ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend, provided gripping and heartbreaking testimony Wednesday about his out-of-control addiction to crack cocaine in the weeks and months before he declared himself drug-free. on a federal firearms form.
Sharing their divergent experiences with President Biden’s son, the two women – Kathleen Buhle, his wife of 24 years, and Zoe Kestan, whom he met in 2017 – painted a composite portrait. They depicted a family man who was both falling into an abyss of addiction and living a lavish, partying life in New York and Los Angeles.
A third woman in Mr. Biden’s life, Hallie Biden, the widow of his late brother Beau, could be called as a prosecution witness as soon as Thursday, the fourth day of Mr. Biden’s trial on charges about which he lied in as part of a request to obtain a firearm in October 2018.
Of the three, she was closest to Mr. Biden when he purchased the gun, and is likely to offer the most complete account of the actions described in his indictment as to whether he lied when of a federal firearm application.
David C. Weiss, the special counsel who also brought more serious tax charges against Mr. Biden in California, turned to the women closest to Mr. Biden to document his drug use, revisiting some of the episodes the most embarrassing of the recent Biden family affair. story – in the heart of an election year.
Nearly all of the events at issue in the lawsuit occurred in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was no longer in office.
Mr. Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, spent much of Wednesday pointing out inconsistencies in the testimony of prosecution witnesses. He also pointed to the lack of evidence in his client’s text exchanges and writings that Mr. Biden was smoking crack cocaine during the month in which he completed the gun application.
The presence of Hunter Biden’s family and friends, including Jill Biden, the first lady, who appeared Wednesday for the third day in a row, underscored how the trial will almost certainly be a painful and personal ordeal for the president’s family .
Ms. Kestan’s entrance into the crowded fourth-floor courtroom was one of the most awkward moments in a trial filled with jarring juxtapositions.
When Leo J. Wise, one of the top prosecutors working for Mr. Weiss, asked him to identify Hunter Biden in the courtroom for the record, he gave him an uncomfortable wave and a fleeting smile before look down, head in your hands.
Ms. Kestan, a designer who worked in New York with artists and textile designers, met Mr. Biden at a gentlemen’s club in December 2017. The two connected immediately — “catching feelings,” as she said. ‘said – afterwards she sat with him in a quiet back room and clicked on a song by Fleet Foxes, an indie rock band.
When they met, Mr. Biden was 48 and Ms. Kestan was 24, exactly half his age.
On several occasions, she described wanting to help him with various attempts at sobriety, although she said she observed him flaking small crystals from a huge fissure rock that she believed had the size of a ping-pong ball.
Ms Kestan said she immediately saw he had a serious drug problem, having experienced addiction issues first-hand with people in his life. Putting him in rehab, she added, was “always part of the conversation.”
As a spellbound courtroom listened, Ms. Kestan provided an almost cinematic rendering of their drug-fueled party at Manhattan Fashion Week in February 2018.
She said he withdrew huge amounts of cash from a Wells Fargo ATM in Midtown Manhattan, sending her to withdraw the money by reading her a special code sent to her phone that was valid for a few minutes.
“He used cash for a lot of things, a lot of it to buy drugs,” Ms Kestan said.
But he also gave her $800 for another purpose: “to buy clothes for her children” at a high-end retailer.
Under cross-examination, Mr. Lowell sought to challenge Ms. Kestan’s credibility, pointing out that while she sometimes encouraged Mr. Biden to stay clean, at other times she introduced him to drug dealers and helped him to develop his dependence.
And he pointed out that although she had seen him using drugs the month before he purchased a Colt Cobra 38SPL revolver, Ms. Kestan was not with him in October, when he returned to Delaware to see his family.
Ms. Buhle’s earlier testimony, by contrast, laid bare the painful personal consequences of Mr. Biden’s reliance on her family.
In a calm, steady voice, she recounted her shock when she found a used crack pipe in an ashtray in the family’s Washington home on July 3, 2015 — and how their marriage disintegrated over the course of two years following.
“He wasn’t himself” when he was on drugs, she said. He became “angry and angry” – even though he tried to hide his addiction from family and friends.
Speaking emotionally, she described how she would scour the family car for evidence of her husband’s crack cocaine use before allowing her daughters to use the vehicle, to ensure “they were not driving not a car containing drugs.”
The third day of the trial ended on a less dramatic note: the prosecution’s questioning of the man who sold Hunter Biden his gun at StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply in a Wilmington, Del., shopping center ., opposite the courthouse.
The salesman, Gordon Cleveland, said he approached Mr. Biden about a minute after he entered the store, asking what he was looking for. Mr. Cleveland, who worked full time for the city, said he did not immediately recognize the scion of his state’s most famous family, but was impressed by Mr.’s black Cadillac. Biden.
“I like guns and I like cars,” he said in a rare moment of levity.
Mr. Cleveland said he saw Hunter Biden answer “no” to the question at the center of this case: Are you an illegal user of or addicted to marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic or other controlled substance?
Mr. Biden did not hesitate before answering or asking for clarification, and did not appear confused by the question, he added.
Mr. Biden is charged with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false statement on the federal firearms application, and possessing an illegally obtained weapon in October 2018.
If convicted, he faces up to 25 years in prison and a $750,000 fine. But nonviolent first-time offenders who have not been charged with using the weapon in another crime rarely receive lengthy prison sentences for those charges.
He has already been charged by two federal grand juries in different jurisdictions. But House Republicans are urging the Justice Department to bring even more charges against the president’s son. In a criminal referral sent Wednesday, the chairmen of three House committees recommended that Mr. Biden and his uncle James Biden be charged with making false statements to Congress during recent testimony.
But other Republicans question why Mr. Biden is being tried on gun-related charges.
“I don’t think the average American would have been charged in the gun case,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said 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 also served as a federal prosecutor, suggested that prosecuting a former addict who was committed to recovery sent the wrong message.
“I’ve been prosecuting guns for six years,” he said this week during an appearance on Fox News. “I bet you there haven’t been 10 cases of drug addicts or illegal drug users who owned guns or lied on license applications being prosecuted nationwide . Why are you pursuing this one?
Prosecutors working for Mr. Weiss have said that holding Hunter Biden accountable is essential to ensuring the principle that no one is “above the law.”
Mr. Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware, filed suit in the gun case after a plea agreement collapsed last July.
Mr. Lowell argued that his decision to file suit was the result of a Republican pressure campaign aimed at targeting Hunter Biden in order to weaken his father’s re-election campaign.
Luke Broadwater contributed reporting from Washington.
