WILMINGTON, Del. — In a cadence that at times was reminiscent of a fish gasping for breath, a lead prosecutor for the special counsel, Derek Hines, worked Tuesday to put the government’s story into place: Hunter Biden was a high-functioning drug addict who lied to friends and family and ultimately broke the law when he checked off a government background check that he wasn’t a drug user while purchasing a gun in 2018.
Hines relied heavily on Hunter’s own words to characterize his habits and addiction leading up to and after the purchase, and later brought in the prosecution’s first witness, an FBI agent, who explained how the government authenticated key pieces of evidence, including files that were taken from a laptop. Biden left at a computer repair shop in Wilmington.
Several jurors took notes as the prosecutor played excerpts from Biden’s 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things,” including a retelling of his first attempt to buy crack cocaine from a homeless woman in Franklin Park in Washington, D.C.
Yet this reporting repeatedly came under pressure.
Tensions also rose outside the proceedings early in the day when Hunter’s wife, Melissa Cohen-Biden, approached former Trump White House aide Garett Ziegler in the hallway outside the courtroom. Cohen-Biden gestured at him, pointed her finger and said, “You have no right to be here, you piece of Nazi….”
Ziegler distributed data from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that documented in vivid detail scenes from the throes of his addiction — some of which has now materialized as evidence against him.
Here’s what you missed on day 2 of the trial:
Dueling stories
Arguing that the prosecution’s heavy-handed timeline focused everywhere but the critical period — barely more than a week — during which Biden possessed the gun, and whether he knowingly lied when he declared he didn’t use drugs, his lawyer played, Abbe Lowell, key again. events from Hines’ story provide a counter-narrative that subtly loosens and reweaves the government’s noose into a story of a man in recovery who was spurred into the hasty firearm purchase at the center of the landmark case against him.
Lowell spoke directly to the judges as he walked them through these moments: Bored while waiting for a new cell phone to be processed, Hunter Biden strolled into a store with “an interesting name,” where a salesperson and self-described “whaler” approached, and eventually “led” the president’s son to buy a Colt Cobra revolver, as well as ammunition, a speed loader (to alleviate the “disadvantage” of loading each cartridge individually), and even a BB gun.
Lowell indicated that Biden rushed to complete the sale, which necessitated filling out the background form, with more than a dozen checkboxes, in the middle of the case.
The seller’s employee also “wanted to complete this sale as quickly as possible,” Lowell said.
Days later, upon learning that his brother’s widow had removed the firearm from his truck and thrown it in a trash can “in front of Janssen’s grocery store,” Biden immediately tried to retrieve it.
Lowell argued that Biden’s decision to store the truck overnight at her home instead of the Best Western where he was staying showed foresight as he prepared to drive to Washington the next day to visit his daughter, Maisy Biden , to visit.
“This is not a place you would consider leaving a good truck to break into, especially if you knew there was a gun locked in the steel box inside,” Lowell said. Later, Lowell said Biden opened his lockbox only once after purchasing the gun.
According to the government, Biden was still addicted when the gun was purchased and thrown in a trash can, and Hines showed the jury how Biden texted Hallie Biden, his brother Beau’s widow, in disbelief: “The damn FBI.. .It’s hard to believe someone could be that stupid… who in their right mind would trust you to help me get sober?’
According to Lowell’s story, when Hunter texted Hallie the day after he bought the gun that he was “outside MD Avenue… waiting for a dealer named Mookie,” and a day later that he was “sleeping on a car smoking crack at 4th Street and Rodney,” it was because the relationship had frayed and not, Lowell suggested, because Biden necessarily did those things.
Lowell also said it was not unusual for Biden to withdraw large sums of cash. And he tried to distance Biden from prosecutors’ discovery of cocaine on the baggie in which the gun was found.
“It was Hallie,” with whom Hunter was in the midst of an “intense” relationship, “and not Hunter” who had packed the gun, bullets and charger from her home into a bag that, when prosecutors tested it years later, showed cocaine residue, Lowell said.
Tensions over evidence
Judge Maryellen Noreika delivered one blow after another to the defense in quick succession, rejecting Lowell’s attempt to admit into evidence several pieces of evidence that appeared to question the defense’s account of events, including a video taken from Biden’s phone had been achieved.
The first, a text message from Hallie to Biden, explained how she discovered the gun.
“It was opened, unlocked and the windows rolled down, and the children searched your car,” Hines read from the court document.
Noreika also wanted to admit a redacted version of a video showing Biden “unclothed” that the defense argued should be withheld because it post-dated the alleged crime.
“No comment is necessary,” the judge said. “Okay, it’s admitted.”
Moments later, the judge admitted into evidence a December 2018 message in which Biden used a vulgar term to call Hallie “selfish” and “self-righteous” and said she was “actually really working against my sobriety,” before adding, ” I’ll get sober if I want to get sober.
Later, Lowell pressed the prosecution’s first witness, FBI Agent Erika Jensen, on whether Biden engaged in the same angry back-and-forth conversations with drug dealers that Hines had shown the jury from periods of Biden’s binge eating. The witness couldn’t tell.
The exchange played out for the jury “four or five months” before Biden bought the gun, Jansen said.
“On the 13th, before you go to another date, that doesn’t tell you anything about drugs that day, right?” Lowell said, referring to messages between Biden and Hallie the day after he bought the gun. “I’m just looking at the 13th as an example.”
Special Prosecutor David Weiss observed the proceedings from the corner of the room, his eyes on Lowell.
During cross-examination, the attorney also examined prosecutors’ reliance on Biden’s account in his memoir of a “relapse” to suggest he was using drugs again. Jansen could not say definitively whether Biden was talking about a drug or alcohol relapse. She agreed that Biden had made many liquor store purchases in October 2018.
Still, Biden seemed optimistic. She greeted one reporter in the courtroom with a fist bump and later joked to another reporter that she was a “troublemaker.”
Biden and his wife hugged and kissed every time they passed during breaks in the proceedings.
Jurors review testimonies about addiction
Lowell reminded the jurors that they “promised to be fair and impartial, to carefully consider all evidence and to follow the law and the rules.”
You need to hear every piece of evidence before making a decision, “not just starting with the idea that if prosecutors bring these charges, they might be right,” he said.
He said they would have to mark ‘not guilty’ on a verdict form today because of the presumption of innocence.
One juror looked stunned as Hines concluded the prosecutor’s opening statements. That expression faded after more than an hour of reading an excerpt from Biden’s memoir, read by him and detailing his drug addiction. Other jurors held their faces in their hands. One woman closed her eyes and another man looked at the ceiling.
Elsewhere in the room, defense allies, closer to President Joe Biden’s age than his son’s, looked straight ahead or at the ground.
Biden’s abandoned laptop
Cohen-Biden began shaking her head as soon as Hines held up the laptop, exchanging occasional whispers with Kevin Morris — an entertainment lawyer who is helping pay Hunter Biden’s legal fees and who was sitting next to her. She continued to shake her head as Jensen explained how the FBI extracted data from the laptop and what the data showed.
Biden showed little emotion as images and text messages taken during the throes of addiction appeared before him.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
