Hunter Biden’s former partners describe toll of his drug abuse

WILMINGTON, Delaware - Two of Hunter Biden’s former romantic partners - his ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend - provided vivid and gut-wrenching testimony on June 5 about his out-of-control addiction to crack in the weeks and months before he

claimed to be drug-free on a federal firearms form

.

Relaying their divergent experiences with US President Joe Biden’s son, the two women - Ms Kathleen Buhle, his former wife of 24 years, and Ms Zoe Kestan, whom he met in 2017 - painted a composite portrait. They depicted a family man who was both falling into an abyss of addiction and living a lavish, party-hopping high life in New York and Los Angeles.

A third woman in Hunter Biden’s life, Ms Hallie Biden, the widow of his late brother Beau, could be called as a witness for the prosecution as early as June 6, the fourth day of Biden’s trial on charges that he lied on an application to obtain a gun in Oct 2018.

Of the three, she was closest to Biden when he bought the gun, and is likely to offer the most complete accounting of actions laid out in his indictment over whether he had lied on a federal gun application.

Mr David C. Weiss, the special counsel who has also brought more serious tax charges against Biden in California, has turned to women closest to Biden to document his drug use, revisiting some of the most embarrassing episodes in the Biden family’s recent history - in the heart of an election year.

Almost all the events at issue in the trial happened in 2018, when Mr Joe Biden was out of office.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell spent much of June 5 pointing out inconsistencies in the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses. He also emphasized a lack of evidence in text exchanges and writings from his client that Biden was smoking crack cocaine during the month in which he filled out the gun application.

The presence of Hunter Biden’s family and friends, including first lady Jill Biden, who appeared for the third day in a row on June 5, has underscored how the trial is all but certain to be a painful and personal ordeal for the president’s family.

Ms Kestan’s entrance into the packed fourth-floor courtroom produced one of the more awkward moments in a trial brimming with jarring juxtapositions.

When Mr Leo J. Wise, a lead prosecutor working for Mr Weiss, asked her to identify Hunter Biden in the courtroom for the record, he offered an uncomfortable wave and a fleeting smile before looking down, head in hands.

Ms Kestan, a designer who has done a range of jobs in New York with artists and textile designers, met Biden at a gentleman’s club in Dec 2017. The two immediately connected - “catching feelings,” as she put it - after she sat with him in a quiet back room and clicked on a song from Fleet Foxes, an indie rock band.

When they met, Biden was 48 and Ms Kestan was 24 - exactly half his age.

At several points, she described wanting to help him with various attempts at sobriety, even as she said she had observed him chipping off small crystals from an enormous rock of crack that she said was the size of a pingpong ball.

Ms Kestan said she immediately saw that he had a serious problem with drugs, having experienced firsthand addiction problems with people in her life. Getting him into rehab, she added, was “always part of the conversation”.

As a riveted courtroom listened, Ms Kestan provided a nearly cinematic rendering of their drug-fueled partying during Fashion Week in Manhattan in Feb 2018.

She said he withdrew enormous quantities of cash from a Wells Fargo ATM in midtown Manhattan, dispatching her to take out the money by reading her a special code sent to his phone that was valid for a few minutes.

“He used cash for a lot of things; a good amount of it was for drugs,” she said.

But he also gave her US$800 (S$1076) for another purpose - to “buy clothes for his kids” from a high-end retailer.

Under cross-examination, Mr Lowell sought to challenge Ms Kestan’s credibility, pointing out that while she was encouraging Biden to stay clean at times, at others she was introducing him to drug dealers and helping enable his habit.

And he emphasised that while she witnessed him using drugs the month before he purchased a Colt .45 revolver, Ms Kestan was not with him in October, when he returned to Delaware to see his family.

Ms Buhle’s earlier testimony, by contrast, laid bare the painful personal toll of Biden’s addiction on his family.

In a quiet, steady voice, she chronicled her shock at finding a used crack pipe in an ashtray at the family’s house in Washington on July 3, 2015 - and how their marriage disintegrated over the next two years.

“He wasn’t himself” when he took drugs, she said. He became “angry, short-tempered” - even though he tried to hide his addiction from family and friends.

Speaking with emotion, she described how she would scour the family car for evidence of her husband’s crack use before allowing her daughters to use the vehicle, to ensure “they were not driving a car with drugs in it”.

The trial’s third day ended on a less dramatic note: the prosecution’s questioning of the man who sold Biden his gun at StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply in a Wilmington, Delaware, strip mall across town from the courthouse.

The salesperson, Gordon Cleveland, said he approached Biden about a minute after he had entered the store, to ask him what he was looking for. Mr Cleveland, who worked full time for the city, said he did not immediately recognize the scion of his state’s most famous family but was impressed by Biden’s black Cadillac.

“I like guns and I like cars,” he said, in a rare moment of levity.

Mr Cleveland said he watched Biden answer “no” to the question at the center of this case: Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?

Biden did not hesitate before answering or ask for any clarification, and did not seem confused by the question, he added.

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, he 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.

He has already been indicted by two federal grand juries in different jurisdictions. But House Republicans are urging the Justice Department to bring even more charges against the president’s son. In a criminal referral sent on June 5, the chairs of three House committees recommended that Biden and his uncle James Biden be charged with making false statements to Congress during recent testimony.

But other Republicans have questioned why Hunter Biden is facing trial on the gun charges.

“I don’t think the average American would have been charged with the gun thing,” Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters this week. “I don’t see any good coming from that.”

He added that in contrast, Biden’s trial on tax-related charges in Los Angeles, which is scheduled to start in September, was appropriate.

Prosecutors working for Mr Weiss have said that holding Biden accountable is essential for ensuring the principle that no one is “above the law”.

Mr Weiss, the Trump-appointed US attorney in Delaware, filed the charges in the gun case after a plea deal fell apart last July.

Mr Lowell has argued that his decision to bring the charges were the result of a Republican pressure campaign to target Biden to weaken his father’s reelection campaign. NYTIMES