A hometown jury decides Hunter Biden’s fate: ‘It’s time to end this case’

Before the jury began deliberating Monday about whether to find Hunter Biden guilty of illegally buying a gun while he was addicted to crack cocaine, federal prosecutors called out the elephant in the courtroom. “It’s time to end this case,” said Lowell, urging jurors to focus on the holes in the evidence: that no witness saw Hunter using drugs in and around the 11-day period when he owned the handgun, that his memoir published years later was not a diary indicative of his state of mind, and that text messages from months or years before or after he bought the gun do little to elucidate how he “knowingly” filled out his background check form. When a federal background check form asked whether he was an unlawful drug user, Biden checked “No.” The gun remained in his possession until Oct. 23, 2018, when his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, said she found the gun in Hunter’s truck, tossed it into a leather pouch and disposed of it in a trash bin outside a high-end grocery store. In an effort to prove the charges, prosecutors embarked on a detailed exhumation of Hunter Biden’s drug use, drawing on his 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things”; his text messages; bank records, including more than $150,000 in cash withdrawals in the months surrounding the gun sale; and testimony from his ex-wife as well as a former stripper turned girlfriend and Hallie Biden, who dated Hunter after her husband died. “He knew he had an addiction when he bought the gun.” Wise also pointed to the days after the gun sale, when in text messages, Hunter told Hallie Biden, cryptically, that he was “buy-ing,” and later, that he was “sleeping on a car smoking crack on 4th street and Rodney,” an intersection in downtown Wilmington, adding, “There’s my truth.” “Take the defendant’s word for it — that’s his truth,” Wise said.