Wilmington, Del. – Hunter Biden’s legal team brought his eldest daughter Naomi to the stand on Friday to help fight his federal gun case, but her testimony quickly unraveled as prosecutors worked their way through old text exchanges between the father and daughter.
Naomi Biden testified for about an hour, explaining that her father was “the clearest” she had seen him in years when she spent time with him in Los Angeles in August 2018, roughly one month before he allegedly lied about being a drug addict on a federal background-check form in order to illegally purchase a fire arm.
Nervous and soft-spoken, Naomi resembled her mother, Kathleen Buhle, who took the stand for the prosecution earlier in the week. Hunter Biden and Buhle have three daughters and were married for over two decades until they divorced in 2017. At one point during Naomi’s testimony, an emotional Hunter Biden dabbed tears from his eyes.
The defense quickly undercut Naomi’s description of her father by reading aloud text messages the pair exchanged while trying to arrange a meeting in New York City in October 2018, just two months after the Los Angeles encounter. The texts were sent at a pivotal moment in the case: between the time Hunter purchased the revolver and the time when his then-girlfriend Hallie Biden disposed of it in a trashcan outside of a Wilmington grocery store.
Ahead of the planned October 2018 meet-up, Naomi and then-boyfriend Peter Neal drove Hunter’s truck from Washington, D.C., to New York City so Neal could move in with Naomi. Then, they planned on returning Hunter’s truck to him and traveling back to Washington in Joe Biden’s Cadillac.
The nature of the text messages the pair exchanged while trying to arrange the car swap suggest Hunter was using drugs at the time, the prosecution argued. Hunter was unreachable for much of the three-day period and, when he did respond, made a bizarre request for Naomi and her boyfriend to deliver his truck to midtown Manhattan at 2 a.m. on October 18, 2018. The exchange never took place.
In the afternoon of October 18, Hunter and Naomi tried again to organize the exchange to no avail. That night, Naomi texted Hunter and seemed to be exasperated. She missed her father and wanted to see him.
“I’m sorry daddy, I can’t take this, I don’t know what to say,” Naomi wrote.
“I just miss you and want to hang out with you,” she continued, adding a sad-face emoji. According to evidence introduced by prosecutors, Hunter was buying drugs with his girlfriend while Naomi was trying to reach him.
“It’s not fair to you,” Hunter responded in a text message the following day, apparently apologizing for being unreachable.
Over the course of his addiction, Naomi said she never saw Hunter use drugs and did not remember spending prolonged periods with him.
The truck exchange appears to have eventually taken place on October 19, 2018. Naomi Biden remembered the truck being in good condition with no drugs or drug paraphernalia present.
Hallie Biden recalled discovering crack-cocaine remnants and paraphernalia in the truck on October 23, the day she found Hunter’s gun and threw it into a trash can by a grocery store. The timing seemed to support the prosecution’s argument that Hunter smoked crack in the truck between the time Naomi left it with him in good condition and the time Hallie Biden found the drug remnants inside.
After the prosecution rested Friday morning, Lowell brought two witnesses who worked in the gun store where Hunter Biden bought the Colt Cobra revolver on October 12, 2018. Hunter Biden is facing three federal gun charges for allegedly lying on gun paperwork during the purchase and allegedly possessing the firearm while being addicted to crack cocaine. He faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted, though will likely receive a lighter sentence as a first-time non-violent offender.
The prosecution is attempting to prove Biden was addicted to crack around the time he purchased and possessed the firearm. Lowell is trying to show Biden was not addicted at the exact moment of the sale based on his supposed behavioral changes.