Prosecutors seek to corroborate testimony from three of his former romantic partners to argue he was still addicted to crack cocaine when he bought the gun.
WILMINGTON, Del.—Prosecutors called Hallie Biden to testify on June 6, the fourth day of Hunter Biden’s federal gun trial, and she detailed their romantic relationship, their alleged drug use, and messages purportedly showing that Mr. Biden was using drugs around the time he bought the firearm.
Ms. Biden is the widow of Mr. Biden’s deceased brother, Beau, who died from cancer in 2015. Mr. Biden previously said he succumbed to crack cocaine addiction after his brother’s death, and he began seeing his sister-in-law romantically around the same time.
She testified to prosecutors that Mr. Biden sent her messages in the days after the gun sale on Oct. 12, 2018. She alleges that Mr. Biden said he was “waiting for a dealer named Mookie” in one and that he was “sleeping on a car smoking crack” in another.
She also alleges that Mr. Biden encouraged her to try crack cocaine, making her “embarrassed and ashamed.” The “terrible experience” led to her own addiction to the drug, Ms. Biden testified.
Mr. Biden is facing three felony charges related to the 2018 firearm purchase. Authorities accuse him of lying to the federally licensed gun store by illegally claiming on his application that he was not a drug user at the time and then unlawfully possessed the gun for 11 days.
Ms. Biden testified that she found the gun in the center console of Mr. Biden’s car and threw it away out of concern for his mental health. She said that Mr. Biden asked her to file a police report on the gun after she threw it in a public garbage can, and police located the man who retrieved it from the trash.
Drug Abuse
Ms. Biden has known Mr. Biden since middle school, she said, and the two began a romantic relationship in late 2015 after the death of her husband. She soon discovered Mr. Biden’s drug use, she alleges, but the two went a step further and rented a house in Annapolis together from the fall of 2017 until July 2018.
She told prosecutors that she saw Mr. Biden using crack cocaine at their shared residence and that at times, his demeanor and behavior became agitated and high-strung, but in other situations, he was “functioning” while on the substance.
Mr. Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, has previously argued that there’s no such thing as a functioning crack cocaine addict, suggesting that Mr. Biden would have been unable to apply for and purchase the gun if he had been addicted to the drug at the time.
Prosecutors sought to align Ms. Biden’s testimony with that of two of his other former partners—ex-wife Kathleen Buhle and ex-girlfriend Zoe Kestan—who both alleged that Mr. Biden was often capable of high-functioning behavior while intoxicated from crack cocaine.
Ms. Kestan testified on June 5 that Mr. Biden at times purchased “ping-pong ball-sized crack rocks.” Prosecutors asked Ms. Biden on June 6 whether she had ever seen him with that amount of the drug. She alleged that Mr. Biden sometimes had “multiple ping pong-sized balls” of crack in his possession, including others roughly the size of marbles.
Ms. Biden said that although she succumbed to addiction after trying the drug, she eventually became clean. However, she alleges that Mr. Biden asked her, “Don’t you want your crack back?” sometime following the gun purchase in October 2018, after she had quit the drug.
“Do you want me to relapse?” she said she remembers asking Mr. Biden after receiving his message.
Ms. Biden alleges that he replied, “For a long time.”
Finding the Gun
She also detailed her discovery of the gun, on Oct. 23, 2018, while looking in the center console of Mr. Biden’s car.
Ms. Biden testified that she panicked after finding the firearm and immediately put it in a leather pouch she allegedly had seen Mr. Biden use for drugs in the past. Prosecutors showed video surveillance footage of Ms. Biden putting the leather pouch in a garbage can outside a grocery store.
“Did you take that from me?” she recalled Mr. Biden asking her in a text later that day.
Ms. Biden also testified that on Oct. 15, 2018, three days after the gun purchase, she sent a text message to Mr. Biden saying, “I’m afraid you’re going to die.”
Mr. Biden allegedly responded, “What one thing have you done to help me get sober?”
During cross-examination, Mr. Lowell probed Ms. Biden’s memory of several text messages used as evidence of Mr. Biden’s alleged ongoing drug addiction, suggesting that some of the claims, such as that he smoked crack on top of a car the day after the gun sale, could be lies or exaggerations.
Mr. Biden is facing up to 25 years in prison if convicted in the federal gun case, although first-time offenders typically receive less than the maximum sentence. It’s unclear whether the judge would give him any prison time.