Hallie Biden, the onetime girlfriend of Hunter Biden and the widow of his late brother, Beau, took the stand on Thursday, the fourth day of his swiftly moving trial on charges he lied on an application to obtain a gun in October 2018.
David C. Weiss, the special counsel who has brought a separate case against Mr. Biden involving more serious tax offenses, has turned to the women closest to Mr. Biden to document his drug use, revisiting some of the most damaging episodes in the Biden family’s recent history as the campaign season intensifies.
Ms. Biden, who was closest to Mr. Biden when he bought the gun, is likely to offer the most complete accounting of actions laid out in his indictment over his claim to have been drug-free when he applied for a gun.
On Wednesday, two of Hunter Biden’s former romantic partners, his ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend, provided vivid and gut-wrenching testimony about his addiction to crack in the weeks and months before he claimed to be drug-free on a federal firearms form.
Almost all the events at issue in the trial happened in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was out of office.
A lawyer for Mr. Biden has suggested he could seek to undercut Ms. Biden’s narrative. In his opening statement on Tuesday, he drew a sharp distinction in the handling of the gun. During the 11 days that Mr. Biden owned the firearm, he never loaded it, never removed it from its lock box in his truck and never used it, Mr. Lowell said. It was his girlfriend at the time, Ms. Biden, who found the gun, removed it from the box, placed it in a pouch that contained drug residue and tossed it in a trash can.
Mr. Biden is charged with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the federal firearms application and possessing an illegally obtained gun in October 2018. If convicted, Mr. Biden could face up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. But nonviolent first-time offenders who have not been accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely receive serious prison time for the charges.
The government’s case turns on a relatively straightforward question: whether Mr. Biden was abusing drugs when he filled out the federal firearms application claiming he was not an “unlawful user” of controlled substances. “Addiction may not be a choice, but lying and buying a gun is a choice,” Derek Hines, a top deputy to the special counsel, David C. Weiss, told jurors in opening statements on Tuesday.
The sheer amount of unflattering evidence assembled by Mr. Weiss is intended to prove that Mr. Biden knowingly lied when he claimed not to be taking drugs when he bought the handgun. But it has, in the view of even some Biden family critics, moved far beyond that goal — into a publicly humiliating trial of the president’s troubled son for an offense that, while a crime, is seldom prosecuted as a stand-alone charge for someone with no prior criminal record who has been sober for years.
