Hunter Biden’s defense team rested Monday at his federal gun trial in Delaware, and the jury could begin deliberating by the end of the day, barring dramatic action.
By Monday morning, each side had worked out jury instructions with the judge and appeared to be speaking privately about other issues. It was clear that Mr. Biden would not testify in his own defense.
Mr Biden, who is President Biden’s son, was angry at the government’s tough cross-examination of his daughter Naomi Biden Neal on Friday and told people around him he would consider getting tested. But the defense, after a weekend of consultations between Mr. Biden and his lead lawyer, Father Lowell, now appear more likely to rest easy without making the risky decision to put Mr. Biden on the stand.
Prosecutors and Mr. Lowell’s team will meet early Monday with the presiding judge to consider a defense request to dismiss the case.
If the judge, Maryellen Noreika, dismisses M. Pursuant to Lowell’s motions, as expected, each side will present closing arguments and Judge Noreika will instruct the jury.
The government sought to show that Mr. Biden regularly used drugs in 2018 and 2019 and he falsely claimed not to use drugs when he filled out a federal firearms form. His lawyers have offered a dynamic, if narrower, defense focused on whether Mr. Biden was in fact using crack cocaine at the time he purchased the gun in October 2018 and sought to undermine the court’s witnesses. accusation by contesting their memories.
Over two days, David C. Weiss, the special counsel in the case, summoned three of Mr. Biden’s former romantic partners, all of whom described in painful detail Mr. Biden’s relentless descent into addiction on crack after his brother died of brain cancer. They included his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; a former girlfriend, Zoe Kestan; and Hallie Biden, his brother’s widow with whom he had an unhappy romantic relationship.
MS. Biden Neal has so far been the only woman called by the defense.
In emotional testimony, she gave an optimistic assessment of his drug use in the weeks before purchasing the gun, saying he seemed “hopeful” and sober.
But under cross-examination, that claim seemed 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 erratic even when they were in the same city.
The prosecution, which rested Friday morning, also pointed to 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.
Over the past week, Mr. Lowell has established that no one saw Mr. Biden use crack the month he purchased the gun. MS. Biden Neal’s testimony changed nothing.
But two text messages recovered from Mr. Biden’s phone hurt his defense from the start. 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 as 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 in the government’s case against Mr. Biden.
Mr. Lowell pointed out that even though the prosecution had spent days questioning 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?” Mr. Lowell told 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.” »