Hallie Biden, Hunter Biden’s former girlfriend and the widow of his late brother Beau, could be called as a witness as early as Thursday, the fourth day of his speedy trial on charges that he lied during a court filing. obtaining a firearm. October 2018.
David C. Weiss, the special counsel who filed a separate suit against Mr. Biden over more serious tax violations, turned to the women closest to Mr. Biden to document his drug use, revisiting some of the most damaging episodes of the Biden affair. the family’s recent history as election season heats up.
Ms. Biden, who was closest to Mr. Biden when he purchased the gun, is likely to offer the fullest account of the actions outlined in her indictment regarding his claim that he had not consumed of drugs when he asked for a weapon.
Two of Hunter Biden’s former romantic partners, his ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend, on Wednesday provided vivid and heartbreaking testimony about his crack addiction in the weeks and months before he declared himself drug-free on gun with federal fire. form.
Nearly all of the events at issue in the lawsuit occurred in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was no longer in office.
A lawyer for Mr Biden suggested he might seek to counter Ms Biden’s narrative. In his opening statement Tuesday, he made a clear distinction in the handling of the weapon. During the 11 days Mr. Biden possessed the firearm, he never loaded it, never removed it from its safe in his truck and never used it, Mr. Biden said. Lowell. It was his then-girlfriend, Ms. Biden, who found the gun, removed it from the box, placed it in a pouch containing drug residue and threw it in a trash can.
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, Mr. Biden could face 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.
The government’s case turns on a relatively simple question: whether Mr. Biden was abusing drugs when he filled out the federal gun application claiming he was not an “illegal user” of controlled substances. “Addiction may not be a choice, but lying and buying a gun is a choice,” Derek Hines, a top deputy to special prosecutor David C. Weiss, told jurors in his closing arguments Tuesday. opening statements.
The amount of unflattering evidence Mr. Weiss has assembled is intended to prove that Mr. Biden knowingly lied when he said he was not taking drugs when he purchased the handgun. But, in the view of even some critics of the Biden family, he went well beyond that goal – in a publicly humiliating trial of the president’s troubled son for an offense that, although a felony, is rarely prosecuted as a separate charge for a person with no criminal record and who has been sober for years.
