Hallie Biden walked briskly to the witness stand, past her brother-in-law and former boyfriend, Hunter Biden, and chronicled her struggles, her own addiction and the short, tragic relationship that ultimately ended with his criminal prosecution.
Biden, 50, is arguably the prosecution's most important witness. She is one of the few people with detailed, intimate knowledge of Biden's crack cocaine addiction in the fall of 2018. He is on trial on charges of lying about his drug use on paperwork to buy a gun in October 2018 and of illegally possessing a firearm.
Once seated, she delivered what appeared to be the heaviest blow yet to Biden's defense: She admitted that within 48 hours of buying a gun in Delaware, Biden had bought and smoked crack cocaine.
But if the purpose of her appearance was to solidify the prosecution's sterile timeline, its effect on Biden was to remind a recovering addict of days of despair and shame. She was visibly shaken by the assignment, frequently glancing between testimony for friendly faces in the gallery.
“It was a horrible experience I had,” she said.
As he spoke, the defendant nodded almost imperceptibly in affirmation.
Biden, nervous and stammering, admitted to jurors that she smoked crack cocaine after the president's youngest son offered her drugs in the summer of 2018. She said she was “ashamed” and embarrassed by her behavior when they briefly lived together in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2015, when both were still recovering from the deaths of her husband and his brother, Beau Biden, from brain cancer.
Their email exchanges were heartbreaking, and the case's lead prosecutor, Leo J. Wise, a normally unhurried and loud man, lowered his voice and seemed to rush as he read their graphic, frantic conversations.
The exchange was alternately accusatory and affectionate, with Biden pleading with her husband, who roams the streets in search of drugs, to get treatment and to stop cheating.
And there were large amounts of drugs: Biden bought crack packs at his Washington apartment, some of which were “the size of ping-pong balls or even bigger,” she said, and stored them in “backpacks and cars.”
Two transactions appeared to be particular blows to Biden's defense, which is based on the claim that he was drug-free at the time he signed a federal inspection form to buy a Colt handgun on Oct. 12, 2018, in Wilmington.
The next day, he sent Biden a text message saying he was “buying,” indicating he was buying crack, she said in court.
In the second message, Biden admitted that late on the night of Oct. 14, he was “sleeping in his car” and “smoking crack cocaine” behind a minor league baseball stadium in Wilmington after buying drugs from a dealer named Mookie.
This was part of a pattern of erratic behaviour, she added, saying her husband would sometimes be out of contact for weeks and would return to her house exhausted, leaving her and the children to search his car for drugs and alcohol so he could “make a fresh start and cope with things”.
On October 23, 2018, 11 days after Biden purchased the gun, Biden confiscated it, drove it to an upscale supermarket in Delaware and threw it in a trash can, ensuring it would never be known who had taken it.
But police quickly retrieved it and contacted her, prompting Biden to frantically contact her multiple times. Biden seemed to immediately understand its dire implications. According to the messages, Biden abused her and called her stupid.
“I take responsibility,” Biden responded. Biden had repeatedly urged her to go to rehab and seemed to view his actions as some kind of interference. “I don't want to live my life like this.”
As Biden's trial moves forward at a rapid clip, one of the most damaging aspects of her testimony on the morning of the fourth day was her claim that Biden took little care in storing his guns when he owned them. In his opening statement, Biden's lawyer, Abe Lowell, argued that Biden stored his guns in a “lock box” in his truck and only took them out once during his ownership.
But the government did produce text messages in which Biden reprimanded her then-boyfriend, saying the box had been left in an unlocked car with “the windows open” and warning that “the kids are going to search your car.”
When she searched her car on October 23, she found “powdered” material that she assumed was “crack cocaine residue” and later found a gun in a broken lock case. Prosecutors then released surveillance video that showed her throwing the gun away, then returning later to frantically try to retrieve it.
“I know now it was a stupid idea, but I just panicked,” she said.
Biden's legal team had earlier signaled they would challenge his credibility by presenting new text messages, some of which were “lewd,” during cross-examination that showed Biden was upset about his affairs and drug abuse. Biden's legal team also suggested that Biden may have lied in the text messages about buying drugs to cover up an affair.
Biden's web of relationships and disappearance of personal boundaries was comical at times: At one point, he texted Biden using the cell phone number of his estranged wife, Kathleen Buehl.
“It scares me,” she wrote.
“This is Katherine, I'm going to beat you to a pulp,” he joked.
Special counsel David C. Weiss, who has filed a separate case against Mr. Biden that includes more serious tax fraud charges, is reexamining some of the most damaging episodes in the Biden family's recent history, enlisting the help of the women closest to Mr. Biden to document his drug use as the race heats up.
On Wednesday, two of Biden's former girlfriends, his ex-wife and a former girlfriend, gave graphic testimony about his cocaine addiction in the weeks and months before he applied for a gun.
Nearly all of the events at issue in the trial took place in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was no longer president.
Lowell suggested Biden could undermine his claims.
Biden is charged with three felony counts: lying to a federally licensed firearms dealer, making a false statement on a federal firearms application, and possessing an illegally obtained firearm in October 2018. If convicted, Biden could face up to 25 years in prison and a $750,000 fine. But non-violent first-time offenders who aren't accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely receive significant prison time for their crimes.
The government's case hinges on a relatively simple question: whether Biden was abusing drugs when he filled out a federal firearms application claiming he was not an “unlawful user” of controlled substances. “Addiction may not be a choice, but lying to purchase a gun is a choice,” Derek Hines, Weiss's chief assistant, told jurors in opening statements Tuesday.
The massive amount of damning evidence Weiss has assembled is intended to prove that Biden knowingly lied when he claimed he was not under the influence of drugs when he purchased the handgun.
But in the view of some Biden family critics, the trial has gone far beyond that goal, veering into a trial to publicly humiliate the troubled president's son for a crime that, although a crime, is rarely the sole offense faced by someone with no criminal record and who has been sober for years.
