WILMINGTON, Del. — Hallie Biden, whose tortured romance with Hunter Biden played a key role in the events leading to the federal gun trial of the president’s son, testified Thursday about her own drug use and the turbulent period in which she found a gun in Hunter Biden’s truck.
Hallie Biden provided the most emotionally charged testimony of the week, describing to a jury of 12 Delawareans and a courtroom full of reporters the dark years after her husband Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015.
Hunter Biden was grieving his brother’s death. Hallie Biden was a recent widow. The two gradually started a romantic relationship in late 2015. Hallie Biden testified that she had never seen crack cocaine before she started dating Hunter Biden. Eventually, she started using the drug too.
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Hunter Biden found guilty
Hunter Biden was convicted Tuesday of lying on gun-purchasing paperwork and unlawfully possessing a gun. Here’s what the guilty verdict means and what’s next.
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Their relationship was sometimes good, sometimes “not so good”— and always complicated, she said. He would disappear for weeks at a time with no contact. She feared he was with other women and that he might kill himself. The two went to meetings for addicts and tried to help each other get sober. In August 2018, Hallie Biden said, she succeeded in curbing her addiction — at least a year before Hunter Biden says he did.
Prosecutors offered Hallie Biden immunity from prosecution on drug charges in exchange for her candid testimony at trial.
“It was a terrible experience that I went through,” she told jurors. “I’m embarrassed and ashamed and I regret that part of my life.”
Hunter Biden faces three felony charges related to the gun he purchased in October 2018. When filling out the required paperwork, he allegedly lied by claiming to not be addicted to or using illegal drugs. He then allegedly affirmed his statement was true, and illegally owned the gun for 11 days as a drug user.
The most serious charge he faces carries a maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison, though Biden would likely face a less severe sentence if convicted because he does not have a criminal history.
President Biden said in an ABC News interview Thursday that he would not pardon his son if the jury finds him guilty.
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Prosecutors are expected to rest their case Friday, with the trial likely running into a second week. The defense says it may present two or three witnesses, and after that the jurors will hear closing arguments and instructions from the trial judge. Deliberations begin after that.
Defense attorney Abbe Lowell said the team had not yet decided if Hunter Biden would testify in his own defense.
His attorneys have admitted at trial that he regularly smoked crack in the months before and after he purchased the weapon at a Wilmington gun store on Oct. 12, 2018. But they have tried to argue that he had recently returned from a rehab stint and was not on crack when he bought the gun and owned it. Hunter Biden, according to his lawyers, didn’t lie on that form to purchase the gun and wasn’t a drug user when the weapon was in his possession.
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Hallie Biden was a critical witness for prosecutors. She had been communicating with Hunter Biden in the days around the gun purchase and saw him while he still had the gun in his possession. Many of their texts were read to the jury, with Hunter Biden lashing out at her when she pleaded for him to get sober and said she feared for his life.
“I am afraid you are doing to die,” she texted him in October. “And I can’t live without you.”
On Oct. 14 — two days after Hunter Biden purchased the gun — he texted Hallie Biden after she had frantically tried to reach him: “I was sleeping on a car smoking crack on 4th street and Rodney,” the message said.
Lowell has suggested to jurors that the text message was not true, and was sent because Hunter Biden was trying to avoid his sister-in-law.
Hallie Biden told jurors that Hunter Biden showed up to her Wilmington home sometime on the morning of Oct. 23 looking exhausted. She suspected he may have been using drugs. While he was asleep, she searched his car for evidence of drug use, something she said she and her children would regularly do in the hopes of helping him beat his addiction.
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Hallie Biden said she found “remnants of crack cocaine,” drug paraphernalia and the gun that Hunter Biden had purchased 11 days earlier. She put the gun in a leather pouch that Hunter sometimes used, drove to a nearby upscale grocery store, and dropped it into an outdoor trash can.
“I panicked,” she testified. “I didn’t want him to hurt himself and I didn’t want my kids to find it and hurt themselves.”
During cross-examination, Lowell focused on sowing doubt in jurors minds about whether Hunter Biden was using drugs during this period. He asked Hallie Biden if she had seen Hunter Biden use drugs during this time — or seen him at all between Oct. 6 and Oct. 22.
She testified that she didn’t think she had.
“You don’t know if he was drinking or using?” Lowell asked her.
“Correct,” Hallie Biden responded.
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She testified that when Hunter Biden learned she had tossed the gun, he told her to return to the trash bin and retrieve it. But when she did, the gun was gone. So she filed a police report, and Hunter Biden went to her house to talk to police about the missing gun.
“Im sorry,” Hallie texted Hunter that day. “I just want you safe. That was not safe.”
Hallie Biden told jurors she has worked to put this chapter of her life behind. She got married over the weekend, and she frequently looked at her husband, who was seated in the second row of the courtroom, during her testimony.
Several Biden family members also were in the courtroom on Thursday, as they have been all week. Valerie Biden Owens, the president’s sister, sat next to Hunter’s wife Melissa Cohen, wearing a crisp white dress and scarf.
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First lady Jill Biden, who flew to France on Wednesday afternoon to attend the D-Day Anniversary Commemoration Ceremony, was returning to Wilmington late Thursday and expected back in court on Friday.
The final witness of the day was a man who often sifted through the trash at the grocery store for recyclables and found the gun that Hallie Biden had tossed.
Ed Banner, 80, struggled to hear the questions asked of him until lawyers stood next to him in the witness box. Banner confirmed finding a silver pistol and taking it home.
When a police investigator came looking for the gun, Banner said, he immediately turned it over. Though the detective testified earlier that Banner had kept the gun with a bunch of socks — and the gun itself inside a sock — Banner scoffed at that detail.
“I didn’t put it in a sock, no,” the witness told Lowell. “I don’t know nothing about no sock.”
After Banner left the witness stand, Judge Maryellen Noreika joked with the lawyers that questioning a witness up close isn’t like it looks in the movies.
“No, it’s not the same as when Perry Mason did it,” said Lowell.
