Hunter Biden’s federal gun trial wrapped up for the week after his daughter took the stand.
Naomi Biden was called to the stand after prosecutors, who have been working to prove that President Joe Biden's son lied about illegal drug use on a federal form to purchase a gun in 2018, rested their case on Friday. Hunter Biden is facing three federal charges in the case, and up to a 25-year prison sentence if convicted.
Naomi Biden testified that her father's drug addiction got bad after his brother Beau died of brain cancer in 2015.
Defense attorney Abbe Lowell focused on Hunter Biden's meetings in New York to see Naomi and help her now-husband Peter George Heermann Neal move. Naomi was attending law school at the time. A car change was on deck to help the move go forward.
The car change involved Hunter's pickup truck, which was mentioned previously in key testimony from Hallie Biden. She is the widow of the president’s other son (and Hunter’s brother) Beau Biden. After Beau's passing, Hunter and Hallie became romantically involved.
When Hallie testified, she recounted the time she found Hunter’s gun in his pickup truck and put it into a leather pouch, and then a shopping bag, before discarding it in a grocery store trash can.
The leather pouch was found to have small amounts of drug residue on it.
In her testimony Friday, Naomi Biden said that before the gun discovery later that month, the truck was clean and contained no drug paraphernalia while in New York. She also said the lock box in the car where the gun was later found was locked and unable to be opened.
Before Naomi, the defense team called Jason Turner and Ron Palimere to testify. Palimere is the owner of the gun shop where Hunter Biden purchased the firearm, and Turner ran Biden’s background check that day in 2018.
Turner said he had no interaction with Biden and didn’t notice anything off about his behavior that would’ve prevented him from selling him the firearm.
Defense Attorney Abbe Lowell spent a lot of time trying to ask Turner if he recalled the sequence of events, which seemed to annoy Turner. Turner at one point sarcastically quipped, “I put on my ritual robes and went and sat in a marble room.”
When Turner was shown the gun form, he expressed skepticism about the first page, and when the defense tried to ask further about it, a government objection to going further on the topic was sustained by the judge.
Earlier in the day, the jury heard from two final witnesses called up by the prosecution.
Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Joshua Romig was the final witness prosecutors called to the stand. He provided expert testimony on his history of going after drug dealers and understanding the lingo between dealers and users.
Romig was cross-examined by Lowell. He emphasized that drug lingo wasn’t used during the time period when Biden bought the firearm.
Prior to Romig, Federal Bureau of Investigation chemist Dr. Jason Brewer, who tested a piece of evidence for drugs, also testified Friday.
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When Brewer testified, he shared results of testing he did on a substance found in two spots on the leather pouch Hallie put the firearm in.
The FBI chemist told the jury that he was only able to work with very little substance that was found on the pouch, but after putting it through a meticulous multi-step chemical process, it came back positive for cocaine. He pointed out that there are different levels of cocaine, the base form of it being crack cocaine. However, he wasn’t able to explicitly say that it was the base form that was found.
The defense team argued that the pouch had passed through many hands since Hunter Biden last had it.
Separately, President Joe Biden made clear that he would not take any action to protect his son from any legal consequences stemming from the trial. He publicly ruled out giving his son a pardon if he gets convicted.
