Hunter Biden’s daughter, Naomi Biden Neal, wanted to take her father’s defense into her own hands and took the stand on Friday. It was unclear whether she helped or hindered her father’s case when she embraced him at the defense table after an emotionally charged hour of testimony.
Biden Neal, 30, told the court that her father seemed “hopeful” and sober just weeks before he claimed no drugs on the gun application at the center of the government’s case. But that optimistic assessment was quickly upended by prosecutors, who presented anguished emails from that time in which she alleged her father had pushed her to her breaking point.
“Dad, I am so sorry. I can’t stand it,” Biden-Neal wrote in October 2018 after his father didn’t respond to several messages she sent him while the two were in New York.
“I don’t know what to say. I just miss you so much,” she said. “I just want to spend time with you.”
Biden Neal’s dramatic testimony — somber, dressed in all black and plagued by a nervous cough — capped the first week of Biden’s trial, in which he is charged with falsely claiming he was sober on an application to buy a handgun in Delaware on Oct. 12.
The government’s goal is to prove that Biden used drugs regularly and knowingly falsified documents in 2018 and 2019. Biden’s defense team has mounted a narrow but vigorous defense centered on questioning whether Biden actually used drugs in October 2018 and challenging the recollections of prosecution witnesses.
Just days before, David C. Weiss, the special prosecutor in the case, called three women with harrowing personal accounts of Biden’s descent into crack and alcohol after his brother’s death in 2015. The women are Mr. Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; his one-time lover, Zoe Kestan; and Hallie Biden, the widow of his brother, Beau Biden, with whom he had an ill-fated relationship.
Biden Neal is the only woman called by the defense, led by veteran lawyer Abe Lowell.
Biden Neal, a Washington lawyer, was eager to help her father, who is the target of what people familiar with the matter say is a politically motivated prosecution. Even if things had gone more smoothly, she would have been able to offer limited insight into the movements of Mr. Biden, who was often absent from her life for months at a time and mercurial even when they were in the same city.
During direct examination, which lasted 11 minutes, Lowell led her through a series of gentle questions to bolster the defense’s argument that her father had been trying hard to break his addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol in the weeks before he bought the gun.
Biden Neal told the court that after having lunch with him in Los Angeles in August 2018, she saw him “more vividly” than she had seen his uncle since his death three years earlier.
“He seemed great and hopeful,” she recalled.
But after tough cross-examination, her arguments appear to have crumbled.
Just three months later, in mid-October 2018, Biden visited New York City, where his daughter was in her second year of law school and living with her boyfriend.
The government has released several text exchanges that suggest his condition is not good.
For hours, Biden ignored Biden Neal’s frantic messages, then showed up at about 2 a.m. with a bizarre request: “Are you awake? Call me,” he wrote his daughter. Biden asked his daughter’s boyfriend to drive a truck the two of them had rented from Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan.
Later that day, Biden Neal and her father exchanged more text messages about the key exchange, and she hoped to meet him, but that didn’t seem likely.
“So you don’t have a boyfriend?!” she messaged him on October 18, adding a sad face emoji.
Biden responded, “I’m sorry. It’s out of touch and it’s not fair.”
They did meet up the next day, though she later admitted that their encounters were usually fleeting, lasting only an hour or two.
Biden Neal appeared composed as she sat on the witness stand and somberly read from a stack of text messages printed by the prosecution. Asked to describe her state of mind, she said she “doesn’t remember sending any text messages,” noting that her recollection of the time was mainly about how difficult it was for the two to communicate.
Her father appeared to be fighting back tears as she spoke.
After Biden Neal left the witness stand, he walked over to his father, who was sitting at the defense table, and they embraced each other before leaving the courtroom together.
The prosecution, which adjourned on Friday morning, had done its best to prove, through witness testimony, hundreds of contemporaneous text messages and bank records, and the defendants’ own words, that Biden had developed an unrelenting addiction to crack cocaine in the months before and after October 2018.
Lowell established over the past week that no one saw Biden take crack cocaine in October 2018 when he bought the gun, and Biden Neal’s testimony on Friday did not change that.
But two text messages recovered from Biden’s phone were damaging to his defense from the start: The day after he bought the gun, he texted that he was meeting with a dealer named Mookie. The next day, he went on to say that he was sleeping in his car and smoking crack cocaine.
The admission culminated in Mr. Lowell’s questioning of the prosecution’s final witness, Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Joshua Romig, who had been asked to translate drug-related jargon used in the government’s case against Mr. Biden.
Lowell noted that prosecutors spent days reviewing Biden’s communications from early 2018 and 2019, showing photos of him holding a crack pipe and emails about buying drugs, but they hadn’t shown anything comparable from October 2018.
“Is there any mention of a janitor boy?” Mr. Lowell asked Mr. Romig. “No mention of a ball?”
“The exception to that is the email we spoke to in October, where he says he smokes crack cocaine,” Romig responded.
The trial is a stark reminder of the harrowing drama that has played out in the Biden family for years, underscored by the daily presence of Mr. Biden’s friends and family in court. First lady Jill Biden, who returned from France on Thursday, re-took her front-row seat behind the defense table on Friday.
The case revolves around the fairly simple issue of whether Biden lied on October 12, 2018, by answering “no” to a specific question on his federal firearms application: “Are you an unlawful user of, or an addict to, marijuana, any sedative, stimulant, opioid, or other controlled substance?”
Biden is charged with three felony counts: lying to a federally licensed firearms dealer, making a false federal firearms application, and possessing an illegally obtained firearm. If convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison and a $750,000 fine. But non-violent first-time offenders who aren’t accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely receive such a heavy sentence for the charge.
It was unclear Friday how many additional witnesses the defense planned to call on Monday, if any.
