On Trial’s 2nd Day, Prosecutors Use Hunter Biden’s Memoir Against Him (2024)

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Prosecutors Use Hunter Biden’s Memoir to Narrate His Spiral Into Addiction

The government’s case against President Biden’s son — for all the drama, media swirl and complex political dynamics — is fairly straightforward: proving that Mr. Biden was abusing drugs when he filled out a federal firearms application claiming he was not an “unlawful user” of controlled substances.

Prosecutors stressed that point in their 15-minute opening statement before a packed courtroom that included Jill Biden, the first lady. Lying on a federal gun application is illegal and “nobody is allowed to lie, not even Hunter Biden,” said Derek Hines, a top deputy to the special counsel, David C. Weiss.

“Addiction may not be a choice, but lying and buying a gun is a choice,” Mr. Hines said.

“Nobody is above the law,” he added, echoing language the Justice Department has repeatedly used to justify its prosecutions of former President Donald J. Trump.

Almost all of the events covered in the trial happened in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was out of office.

Mr. Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said he would disprove the government’s core contention that Mr. Biden “knowingly” broke the law by answering “no” on a question asking applicants whether they were using drugs at the time they sought to purchase a gun.

He implied that the present tense of the question about drug use — the verb “is” — meant the government must prove Mr. Biden was getting high at the exact time he bought the gun.

The salacious details of Mr. Biden’s private life have made him a fixture of the tabloids and an irresistible target for Republicans. But Mr. Lowell, banging the podium for emphasis, urged jurors to focus on the nuances of the case, and emphasized that while Mr. Biden was addicted to crack cocaine from 2015 to 2019, he had sporadic periods of sobriety when he could credibly claim to be drug-free. The law, he said, was not intended to punish “mistakes.”

Mr. Lowell, speaking for about 45 minutes, drew a sharp distinction in the handling of the gun as well as other stand-alone prosecutions of violations on a gun application, which often entail violence or other criminal activity. After Mr. Biden bought the gun, he never loaded it, never removed it from its lock box in his truck and never used it during the 11 days he owned it, Mr. Lowell said.

It was his girlfriend at the time, Hallie Biden, who found the gun, removed it from the box, placed it in a pouch that contained drug residue and tossed it in a trash can at a nearby grocery store. And Mr. Biden was not happy she did so.

“Did you take that from me, Hallie?” Mr. Biden texted after learning she had taken the gun from the lock box because she feared he might kill himself with it. “Are you insane. Tell me now. This is no game.”

Later, after he was contacted by the local police, he suggested that the weapon might be discovered by the F.B.I., which he referred to using an expletive.

“It’s hard to believe anyone is that stupid,” he added.

Ms. Biden is expected to be called as a witness for the prosecution, perhaps as early as Wednesday. Mr. Lowell suggested he might sharply question her version of events on cross-examination.

For the first two days of the trial, Hunter Biden’s family watched attentively from the row of seats right behind him. At one point, when his lawyer spoke about support from his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, in helping him maintain his sobriety, Mr. Biden turned around to look at them.

If prosecutors began with a focused outline of their case, their presentation soon slowed with the testimony of their first witness, an F.B.I. agent who served as a kind of docent. The agent, Erika Jensen, guided the jury through exhibits and played extended audio clips of Mr. Biden reading chapters of “Beautiful Things,” his autobiography, detailing his addiction to crack at the time he bought the gun.

The sound of Mr. Biden’s voice, piped in through speakers as he listened tight-lipped, was jarring and it initially transfixed the courtroom. But after about a half-hour, attention drifted, even, it seemed, among prosecutors.

At one point, Mr. Hines asked Ms. Jensen, “We’re still in Chapter Eight, right?”

The trial, which is expected to last about a week, promises to be an excruciating personal ordeal for the Biden family.

On Tuesday, Mr. Hines said prosecutors planned to summon Ms. Biden and another woman Mr. Biden was romantically involved with, Zoe Kestan, in addition to his former wife, Kathleen Buhle, who is likely to testify first.

He also plans to call Gordon Cleveland, an employee at the Delaware gun store where Mr. Biden bought his weapon, and two expert witnesses who will testify on drug residue and other forensic evidence.

The purpose is to provide witness testimony to fill in gaps left by dozens of documents and texts — some extracted from Mr. Biden’s lost laptop computer — which the government presented to the jury Tuesday afternoon.

Ms. Jensen painstakingly posted texts from Mr. Biden and the people who sold, or obtained, crack for him on screens throughout the courtroom, painting a picture of a desperate man who seemed to spend every waking minute in mid-2018 hunting for drugs.

She juxtaposed those patterns with his cash withdrawals that averaged a staggering $50,000 a month that fall, in an effort to connect his runaway spending to his out-of-control addiction. That included a $5,000 withdrawal on Oct. 12, 2018, the day he bought the weapon.

Mr. Lowell, who began his cross-examination of the F.B.I. agent as the session on Tuesday neared a close, seized on the government’s lack of evidence, such as frantic texts to his dealers around the time of the gun purchase, to prove the withdrawals were linked to drug deals.

If the government was using more than 60 text messages between Mr. Biden and someone else on Feb. 26, 2019, to establish that he was using drugs, there was nothing like that in October, supporting the defense’s argument that Mr. Biden was not an unlawful user of drugs when he filled out the federal form to purchase his gun.

Mr. Biden is charged with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the federal firearms application used to screen applicants and possessing an illegally obtained gun in October 2018. He faces a separate trial in Los Angeles this fall on tax charges.

If convicted on the three gun-related charges, Mr. Biden could face up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. But nonviolent first-time offenders who have not been accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely receive serious prison time for the charges.

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It’s rare for a defendant to face the same gun charges as Hunter Biden without an underlying crime.

Prosecutions for lying to a dealer are relatively rare, averaging fewer than 300 per year. There were some 25 million to 30 million background checks performed annually around the time of Mr. Biden’s gun purchase, according to statistics obtained by The Washington Post.

Charges of illegal firearms possession are much more common. But they too are most often used as an add-on, to leverage plea deals or to ensure that a defendant is convicted on at least one charge if there are doubts that they will be convicted on an underlying charge, Mr. Fishwick and other former prosecutors said.

In May 2023, for example, when more than 20 people in Savannah received sentences from 10 months to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to illegal firearms possession, all of them had criminal records or were caught in the act of committing another crime.

When officials with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reviewed Hunter Biden’s gun application several years ago, they believed the case most likely would have been dropped if the target were a lesser-known person — because the gun had not been used in a crime and Mr. Biden had taken steps to get and stay sober, according to a former law enforcement official familiar with the situation.

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A prosecutor includes ‘No one is above the law’ in his opening statement, echoing cases against Trump.

That he chose to begin with that principle reflects the extraordinary context and timing of both the gun trial and a separate tax case against Mr. Biden, which come in an election year. They also come at a time when Mr. Trump has been convicted on criminal charges in New York, but his two pending federal trials have been delayed, more or less indefinitely, by some federal jurists he himself appointed.

This year, Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Mr. Trump for election interference in Washington, told the Supreme Court that “no person is above the law” in arguing for the case to proceed even as Mr. Trump campaigns to win back the White House.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has repeatedly deployed the “nobody is above the law” formulation to parry Mr. Trump’s unfounded claim that he was being targeted by the Justice Department to help out President Biden.

He used it not only to justify his appointment of Mr. Smith, but to explain his decision to authorize the search of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which led to the former president’s indictment on charges of illegally retaining documents and obstructing investigators.

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Hallie Biden is one of the government’s top witnesses and is expected to provide first-hand accounts of Biden’s drug use in 2018.

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The government’s case against Hunter Biden is expected to point to his own words.

Prosecutors say Mr. Biden misrepresented the extent of his drug use in completing a federal form to buy a firearm on Oct. 12, 2018. At the time, he replied “no” to the question: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?”

Mr. Biden’s defense team argues that the terms “user” or “addict” are not defined on the form he filled out. They say the question itself is in the present tense.

“Someone, like Mr. Biden who had just completed an 11-day rehabilitation program and lived with a sober companion after that, could surely believe he was not a present tense user or addict,” Mr. Biden’s lawyers wrote in a court filing.

Yet, prosecutors say, Mr. Biden recognized he was an addict. They point to his memoir, in which he described in some length a four-year addiction to crack cocaine, a period that included his purchase of the gun. In detailing his multiple attempts at rehabilitation, Mr. Biden at one point concludes those efforts were “insincere.”

Recalling the tumultuous period of his life after he bought the gun, Mr. Biden wrote: “I hardly went anywhere now, except to buy. It was me and a crack pipe in a Super 8.”

In addition to excerpts from his book, prosecutors have singled out text messages and metadata retrieved from his phone days after he acquired the gun. On Oct. 13, Mr. Biden texted that he was meeting with his drug dealer, Mookie. The next day, he sent a message that read, “I was sleeping on a car smoking crack,” at an intersection in Wilmington.

The government has signaled that it intends to call people who witnessed his drug use first hand — Mr. Biden’s former wife, Kathleen Buhle; his brother Beau’s widow, Hallie, whom he was seeing during that period; and another woman he dated from December 2017 through October 2018 who told investigators she observed Mr. Biden using crack cocaine every two hours, except for when he slept.

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For some jurors, getting to the trial could be a challenge.

Maryellen Noreika, the judge presiding over the case, questioned potential jurors on Monday about any financial and logistical concerns they might have about serving on the jury this week, including whether they have reliable access to transportation.

After briefly ruling on some evidence that could come up in testimony, Judge Noreika paused to wait while lawyers quietly milled around the courtroom. Proceedings resumed around 10:00, about an hour after the trial started this morning.

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Jury selection gave a surprising glimpse into Delaware itself.

“Next juror, please,” Judge Maryellen Noreika said, with a slight grin.

Hunter Biden, his legal team and his family are hoping to turn the court’s attention away from his actions during a long period of out-of-control drug and alcohol use to the more universal experiences of families affected by relatives with substance abuse problems, and Mr. Biden’s recent success in staying sober.

Many of the would-be jurors spoke emotionally about their own families’ struggles, with one man breaking down in tears when he talked about a brother-in-law who had been addicted to drugs.

Another juror candidate shared a relative’s history with substance abuse and how it had made her more sympathetic with other people experiencing similar problems.

“It’s a disease, and I don’t look down on that,” she said as Hunter and Jill Biden craned forward in their seats to listen intently. “People have problems.”

Of the four Black men, three Black women, three white women and two white men who made it onto the jury, several had revealed they had close family members who had struggled with drug and alcohol problems.

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Leo Wise, who was assigned the case just before the plea deal collapsed, is known as an aggressive prosecutor.

Mr. Wise, who had been assigned to the Biden case only a few weeks earlier, is now the lead prosecutor in Mr. Biden’s gun trial in Delaware, which begins Monday, and for his trial on tax charges scheduled to start in Los Angeles in September.

So far, he has lived up to his reputation as one of the department’s harder-charging prosecutors, limiting communication with the defense team, drafting a scathing and at times lurid indictment in the tax case, and signaling his intention to delve into the ugliest episodes of Mr. Biden’s tangled personal life during the gun trial.

That he was assigned to assist David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware who was subsequently designated a special counsel, was in itself telling.

Mr. Wise had nothing to do with the plea deal. He had been transferred to the department’s criminal division at the request of the department’s senior leaders, then detailed to Delaware to add legal firepower to the relatively small office in Wilmington, current and former officials said.

His transfer coincided with efforts by congressional Republicans to portray Mr. Weiss — a Trump appointee held over by President Biden’s aides — as offering “a sweetheart deal” to the Bidens.

During nearly two decades in the Baltimore U.S. attorney’s office, Mr. Wise, 47, earned a reputation as one of the department’s most aggressive frontline prosecutors. He took on such high-profile cases as the indictment of a former mayor, Catherine Pugh, on corruption charges and convictions of two rogue members of the city’s gun trace task force.

He has not been afraid of publicity. In early 2023, he published a memoir covering the police trial, describing himself as “the prosecutor who took down Baltimore’s most crooked cops.”

Mr. Wise, a Harvard Law graduate who has served in the Navy Reserve, began his career at the Justice Department working on two of the most significant corporate cases in recent history: the prosecutions of Philip Morris and Enron in the early 2000s, working alongside Kathryn Ruemmler, who would go on to become President Barack Obama’s White House counsel. He would go on to work as an ethics investigator on Capitol Hill.

He has been shortlisted to lead some of the department’s most sensitive investigations.

In late 2022, Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, briefly considered him as a candidate to run the team overseeing the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump’s election interference case, according to people with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

But he was passed over because it was believed he might clash with prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, they said. Ms. Monaco eventually chose another prosecutor from Maryland, Thomas P. Windom, to run the team.

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