Prosecutors began their closing arguments on Monday in Hunter Biden’s federal firearms trial in Delaware, seeking to show that Mr. Biden was abusing drugs when he bought a gun in October 2018.
Earlier, Mr. Biden’s lawyers made clear he would not be taking the witness stand. The judge instructed jurors shortly after that they needed to determine only whether Mr. Biden had used drugs recently or whether he was an addict at the time he claimed to be drug-free in filling out a federal firearms application.
Leo Wise, the top prosecutor for the special counsel, David C. Weiss, told jurors that there was no question whether Mr. Biden fulfilled either description on Oct. 12, 2018, the day he obtained the gun.
He added that Mr. Biden’s own memoir and other evidence presented at the trial made that undeniably clear. “The defendant used crack and was addicted,” he said, adding that “he knew he used crack and was addicted to it at the relevant time period.”
The prosecution has also pointed to hundreds of text messages and bank records, as well as to the defendant’s own words, to illustrate Mr. Biden’s unyielding drug addiction in the months before and after October 2018.
Mr. Wise said there was no question that Mr. Biden knew he used drugs. “The defendant knew what he was doing” when he answered “no” on the federal form, Mr. Wise said, adding that there was no doubt he was an addict. He said if Mr. Biden had not gone to rehab, he may have had an argument that he did not know he was addicted to crack cocaine. But Mr. Biden did, multiple times.
Mr. Biden’s lawyers have offered a spirited, if narrower, defense centered on whether Mr. Biden was actually doing crack cocaine at the time he bought the gun and have sought to undercut the prosecution’s witnesses by challenging their recollections.
Mr. Biden, who is President Biden’s son, was angered by the government’s tough cross-examination of his daughter Naomi Biden Neal on Friday and had told people in his orbit that he would consider taking the stand. But the defense, after a weekend of consultations between Mr. Biden and his lead lawyer, Abbe Lowell, rested without taking that risky step.
In emotionally raw testimony, Ms. Biden Neal gave an upbeat assessment of his drug use in the weeks before he bought the gun, saying he seemed “hopeful” and sober.
But under cross-examination, that claim seemed to crumble, with prosecutors introducing text messages from that period that illustrated an anguished, and excruciating, relationship in which she informed her father that he had driven her to the breaking point.
Still, Ms. Biden Neal could offer only limited insights into the actions of Mr. Biden, who was often absent from her life for months and erratic even when they were in the same city.
Over the last week, Mr. Lowell has established that no one saw Mr. Biden doing crack cocaine in the month he bought the gun. Ms. Biden Neal’s testimony did not change that.
But two text messages retrieved from Mr. Biden’s phone have hurt his defense from the start. One day after he purchased the gun, he sent a text saying he was meeting a dealer named Mookie. A day later, he followed up to say that he was sleeping on a car and smoking crack.
The apparent admission came to a head on Friday as Mr. Lowell questioned the prosecution’s last witness, Joshua Romig, a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, who was asked to translate drug lingo introduced in the government’s case against Mr. Biden.
Mr. Lowell made the point that while the prosecution had spent days examining Mr. Biden’s communications from earlier in 2018 and 2019, showing pictures of him holding a crack pipe and texts about buying drugs, there was nothing comparable to show for October 2018.
“No reference of Chore Boy?” Mr. Lowell said to Mr. Romig, referring to terms related to crack use. “No mention of a ball?”
Mr. Romig responded, “With the exception of the October text that we talked about, where he said he was smoking crack.”
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