Prosecutors began closing arguments Monday in Hunter Biden’s federal gun trial in Delaware, seeking to demonstrate that Mr. Biden was abusing drugs when he purchased a gun in October 2018.
Earlier, Mr. Biden’s lawyers made clear he would not take the witness stand. Shortly afterward, the judge asked jurors to consider only whether Mr. Biden had recently used drugs or was a drug addict at the time he claimed not to use drugs while filling out a federal firearms application .
Leo Wise, the lead prosecutor for special prosecutor David C. Weiss, told jurors there was no doubt Mr. Biden met either description on Oct. 12, 2018, the day he got the weapon.
He added that Mr. Biden’s own memoir and other evidence presented at trial made that undeniably clear. “The defendant was using crack cocaine and was addicted to it,” he said, adding that “he knew he was using crack cocaine and was addicted to it at the relevant time.”
The prosecution also cited hundreds of text messages and bank statements, as well as the defendant’s own words, to illustrate Mr. Biden’s unyielding drug addiction in the months before and after October 2018.
Mr Wise said there was no doubt Mr Biden knew he was using drugs. “The defendant knew what he was doing” when he answered “no” on the federal form, Mr. Wise said, adding that there was no doubt he was a drug addict. He said if Mr. Biden hadn’t gone to rehab, he might have had an argument that he didn’t know he was addicted to crack. But Mr. Biden has done it repeatedly.
Mr. Biden’s lawyers have offered a spirited, if narrower, defense focused on whether Mr. Biden was actually using crack cocaine at the time he purchased the gun and have sought to undermine the court’s witnesses. accusation by contesting their memories.
Mr. Biden, who is President Biden’s son, was angered by the government’s tough cross-examination of his daughter Naomi Biden Neal on Friday and had told people around him that he would consider speaking out. But the defense, after a weekend of consultations between Mr. Biden and his lead lawyer, Father Lowell, rested without taking this risky step.
In emotional testimony, Ms Biden Neal gave an upbeat assessment of his drug use in the weeks before purchasing the gun, saying he seemed “hopeful” and sober.
But under cross-examination, that assertion appeared to fall apart, with prosecutors introducing text messages from that period depicting an agonizing and excruciating relationship in which she informed her father that he had pushed her to the breaking point.
Yet Ms. Biden Neal was able to offer only limited insight into the actions of Mr. Biden, who was often absent from her life for months and irregular even when they were in the same city.
Over the past week, Mr. Lowell established that no one saw Mr. Biden using crack cocaine during the month he purchased the gun. Ms. Biden Neal’s testimony did not change that.
But two text messages retrieved from Mr. Biden’s phone immediately undermined his defense. A day after purchasing the gun, he sent a text message saying he was meeting a dealer named Mookie. A day later, he responded saying he was sleeping in a car and smoking crack.
That apparent admission came to a head Friday when Mr. Lowell questioned the prosecution’s final witness, Joshua Romig, a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, who was asked to translate the drug jargon introduced into the case government against Mr. Biden.
Mr. Lowell pointed out that although the prosecution had spent days reviewing Mr. Biden’s communications from early 2018 and 2019, showing photos of him holding a crack pipe and texts about purchasing drugs, there was nothing comparable to show for October 2018.
“No reference to Chore Boy?” said Mr. Lowell to Mr. Romig, referring to terms related to crack use. “No mention of a ball?”
Mr. Romig responded: “Except for the October text that we talked about, where he said he smoked crack.” »
News Source : www.nytimes.com
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