Hunter Biden Gun Trial
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During the cross-examination, government lawyers elicited anguished, and excruciating, details about their relationship at the time.
Eileen Sullivan, Glenn Thrush and
Reporting from Wilmington, Del.
Hunter Biden’s daughter Naomi Biden Neal took the stand on Friday in hopes of taking her father’s defense into her own hands. By the time she embraced him at the defendant’s table after an hour of emotionally raw testimony, it was unclear whether she helped or harmed his cause.
Ms. Biden Neal, 30, told the court her father seemed “hopeful” and sober weeks before he claimed to be drug-free on a gun application at the heart of the government’s case. But that upbeat assessment was quickly undercut by prosecutors, who introduced anguished texts from that period in which she told her father he had driven her to the breaking point.
“I’m really sorry, dad, I can’t take this,” Ms. Biden Neal wrote in October 2018, after he had failed to respond to several of her messages when they were both in New York.
“I don’t know what to say, I just miss you so much,” she said. “I just want to hang out with you.”
The dramatic testimony by Ms. Biden Neal — somber, clad in black and nagged by a nervous cough — capped the first week of Mr. Biden’s trial on charges that he falsely claimed to be sober on an application to buy a handgun on Oct. 12 in Delaware.
The government’s goal is to prove Mr. Biden was using drugs regularly in 2018 and 2019 and knowingly falsified the form. His lawyers have offered a spirited, if narrower, defense centered on questioning whether Mr. Biden was actually using drugs in October 2018 and challenging the recollection of the prosecution’s witnesses.
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