http://nypost.com/2024/05/21/us-news/hunter-bidens-ex-wife-and-sister-in-law-turned-lover-to-take-witness-stand-in-his-gun-trial/
By Josh Christenson
The New York Post
May 21, 2024
Hunter Biden, this is your life!
The first son’s ex-wife and a pair of his former lovers are slated to testify in Delaware federal court about his crack cocaine addiction as he heads to trial on weapons charges beginning June 3.
Hunter’s former spouse Kathleen Buhle, his sister-in-law-turned-lover Hallie Biden and ex-girlfriend Zoe Kestan all have memories of the now-54-year-old’s near-constant drug use during the period in October 2018 when he lied about his addiction and purchased a handgun, according to Monday court filings.
Hunter Biden’s ex-lovers, including former wife Kathleen Buhle, will testify in Delaware about the troubled first son’s crack addiction as he heads to trial for federal gun crimes on June 3. ABC News
Hunter deliberately claimed on a federal background check form that he was neither a user of controlled substances nor an addict when buying the firearm on Oct. 12, 2018, prosecutors allege, pointing out in filings earlier this year that cocaine was found on the gun’s pouch.
Hallie’s testimony will confirm that Hunter returned to Delaware around the same time and owned the Colt Cobra .38 special for 11 days before she threw it into a trash can outside a Wilmington supermarket.
Special counsel David Weiss indicted the first son on three felony counts this past September, accusing him of illegally possessing the gun and lying on the background check form.
Weiss did not reveal the witnesses’ names in the filings, but their identities are clear from public reports, data from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, other records produced from House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Biden and excerpts from Hunter’s own 2021 memoir “Beautiful Things.”
The testimony of sister-in-law-turned-lover Hallie Biden will confirm that Hunter returned to Delaware around the same time and owned the Colt Cobra .38 special for 11 days before she threw it into a trash can outside a Wilmington supermarket.
Hunter, in an interview with the Daily Beast published Monday, indicated that some photos of drug use found on his laptop were misleading.
A notorious photo shows the Biden scion fast asleep with what appears to be a crack pipe in his mouth, but it is not, in fact, a crack pipe, he told the outlet.
“That’s actually a meth pipe,” Hunter said of the photo, which he now claims was staged.
But in troves of text messages obtained by prosecutors, Hunter admitted to buying and using drugs as well as to trying and failing to maintain sobriety over a roughly four-year period that included his purchase of the gun.
Kestan is alleged to have told prosecutors that during her more than nine-month relationship with Hunter in 2018 he smoked crack cocaine “every 20 minutes except when he slept.”
“That’s actually a meth pipe,” Hunter told the Daily Beast of a purported photo of his drug abuse, which he now claims was staged.
The lingerie and textile designer testified before a grand jury in February 2022 about her and Hunter’s trysts in high-priced hotels four years prior, as part of the DOJ’s lengthy tax probe of the first son.
Kestan also visited Hunter in November 2018 after a “short stint at a therapist-run wellness center in Newburyport, Massachusetts,” according to photos and other data from his laptop hard drive analyzed by the nonprofit research group Marco Polo.
Buhle told Hunter in a March 9, 2018, message that she had “found a few crack pipes” in the family car and removed them because their “daughter was driving” it at the time.
Prosecutors also said that Buhle “found drugs or paraphernalia on approximately a dozen occasions, which she discarded in a trash can,” and Hunter began using her cellphone to communicate in October 2018 with Hallie, the widow of his brother, Beau, the former attorney general of Delaware who had died three years earlier of brain cancer.
Hunter and Buhle separated in October 2015, and she filed for a divorce that was finalized in April 2017 — claiming in court papers that her husband had spent “extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations), while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.”
Hallie Biden is the widow of Hunter’s brother, Beau, the attorney general of Delaware who died of brain cancer in May 2015. Ron Sachs / CNP
In a page from the first son’s memoir entered into evidence, Hunter wrote that he returned to Delaware in the “fall of 2018, after my most recent relapse in California, with the hope of getting clean through a new therapy and reconciling with Hallie.”
At the time, Hunter was “in the throes of addiction and need[ed] help coupled with love,” Hallie said of her brother-in-law, as the two carried on an affair before, during and after the purchase of the handgun.
Hunter was aware he was an addict the same day that Hallie took his gun, according to other text messages introduced by prosecutors that had been revealed via IRS whistleblower disclosures to the House Ways and Means Committee last year.
“The f–ing FBI Hallie. It’s hard to believe anyone is that stupid,” Hunter raged in one message after meeting with police who recovered the gun in October 2018. “Owning a gun that’s in a locked car hidden on another property? You say I invade your privacy. What more can I do than come back to you to try again. And you do this????”
Hunter was “in the throes of addiction and need[ed] help coupled with love,” Hallie said of her brother-in-law’s state of mind before, during and after the purchase of the handgun.
“Who in their right mind would trust you would help me get sober?” he fumed.
Other location data contained in photos from Hunter’s cellphone and messages to Hallie corroborate his crack abuse.
“I was sleeping on a car smoking crack on 4th Street and Rodney,” he wrote in an Oct. 14, 2018, text to Hallie.
Records produced from House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Biden corroborated some of the witnesses. Josh Morgan-USA TODAY
One month after the gun incident, Hunter also confessed to Hallie: “I’m a liar and a thief and a blamer and a user and I’m delusional and an addict unlike beyond and above all other addicts that you know and I’ve ruined every relationship I’ve ever cherished.”
He also in December 2018 texted Hallie to admit “completely” that he was an addict but would “get sober when I want to get f–king sober.”
Hallie witnessed his drug use and even searched through Hunter’s “bags, backpacks, and vehicle in an effort to help him get sober, and discovered drug paraphernalia and drugs in his possessions on multiple occasions,” prosecutors added.
Prosecutors said they may also show evidence from other text messages if Hunter’s defense team — including lead attorney Abbe Lowell — argues their client was unaware of his actions. AP
The court will also hear testimony from DEA Supervisory Special Agent Joshua Romig, “who will opine on coded terms and drug language” in Hunter’s text messages, and prosecutors also plan “to show videos and photographs of the defendant smoking crack.”
FBI Special Agent Erika Jensen, an employee of Starquest Shooters in Wilmington — where Hunter bought the revolver — and two Delaware state police officers will also testify.
Lunden Roberts, an ex-stripper who gave birth to Hunter’s love child, Navy Joan, in 2018, will apparently not be called to testify — despite her year-long romance with him overlapping his liaisons with two other witnesses.
A source familiar with Kestan’s grand jury testimony previously told The Post that Hunter impregnated Roberts just before meeting Kestan but never disclosed the relationship with his baby mama or the birth of his daughter.
Hunter and Buhle share three daughters — Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy — the last of whom was also coached in basketball by Roberts in 2017, according to emails on Hunter’s abandoned laptop.
Prosecutors said they may also show evidence from other text messages if Hunter’s defense team — including lead attorney Abbe Lowell — argues their client was unaware of his actions.
Hunter Biden and his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, were seen leaving the Giorgio Baldi in Los Angeles on May 16.
GC Images
The IRS disclosures to Congress include one message in which Hunter told Hallie that he was “proven unstable when you put a gun in the trash can … out of FEAR.”
The first son has pleaded not guilty to the Delaware indictment, for which he faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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