Surveillance camera footage shows a nondescript suburban scene: a dark SUV pulls up in the parking lot of an upscale grocery store. A woman with sunglasses comes out. She grabs a purple gift bag from the backseat, glances over her shoulder, then tosses it into the trash can on the way to the grocery store.
A jury in Wilmington, Delaware, said last week that the woman was Hallie Biden, the former daughter-in-law of the current US president. Inside the bag was a gun that belonged to Biden’s troubled son, Hunter, who, it turns out, was having an affair with Hallie – his late brother’s widow. During that relationship, Hunter forced the mother of two children to use crack cocaine.
The week-long criminal trial, in which jurors began deliberating Monday, focused on Hunter Biden and whether he lied on a federal background check about his own drug addiction when he bought the gun in October 2018 at a local store called StarQuest Shooters and Survival .
But the trial also offered something else: a raw — at times harrowing — look at the turmoil in the Biden family after the president’s eldest son and presumed political heir, Beau, died in 2015 of brain cancer.
It is not clear if this has political implications for Biden as he fights for re-election. AND poll An Emerson College survey earlier this month found that 64 percent of voters said the trial would not affect how they would vote.
Republicans have tried for years, and largely failed, to pin Hunter’s sins on his father — whether it was his drug abuse, his failure to support a child fathered out of wedlock, or his business dealings. Their efforts intensified as former President Donald Trump’s campaign became encumbered by his own campaign legal troubles.
While the trial’s revelations were uncomfortable, some believe it could remind voters of Biden’s virtues as a father, especially at a time when so many American families are dealing with drug addiction.
This is the point of view of Chris Whipple, who described the family in his book The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House. “To me, the trial confirms what we’ve always known about Joe Biden,” Whipple said. “It’s hard to overstate how strong the bond is between him and Hunter. How close they are.”
Even if his political career demanded it, Whipple is confident that the president would never reject Hunter. “Family is everything to Biden,” he noted.
As Hunter himself told the New Yorker in 2019, he was something of a security blanket for his father on the campaign trail. “I can tell him things no one else can,” he explained.
Their relationship is forged in a Kennedy-esque tragedy that is both family lore and political biography. Biden’s young wife and daughter were killed in a car accident a week before Christmas 1972. Just 29 years old, the newly minted senator was sworn into office days later by the bedside of his boys, Beau and Hunter, who survived the crash.
As he often said at campaign events, Biden would take the train home from Washington, DC, every night to kiss his boyfriends goodnight. Beau’s untimely death added another chapter to the story. As he ran for president in 2020, Biden held up his fallen son as his inspiration and guiding spirit.
Behind the scenes, however, the grieving family was falling apart, like Hallie recounted from the witness stand on Thursday. A few months after Beau’s death, she and her brother-in-law began a “complicated” romance. Hunter would disappear for weeks at a time – often high on drugs. When she first found his stash of crack in her house, she had to consult Google, Hallie said, because she didn’t know what it was. Soon she started smoking it too. She became paranoid that he was seeing other women.
“It was a horrible experience that I went through,” Hallie, now sober and recently remarried, told the court. “I am embarrassed and ashamed and regret that period of my life.”
Hunter did not testify, but prosecutors played extended clips from the audiobook of his 2021 memoir. Nice stufflast week. He was forced to listen as his own voice filled the courtroom, recounting his descent into crack addiction.
“I was buying crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, DC, and cooking my own in a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. I was so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t walk a block between the liquor store and my apartment without opening a bottle to take a sip,” he said in one passage.
Have your say
Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump: tell us how the 2024 US election will affect you
While Hunter’s foibles were recounted at length — whether he was setting up a meeting with dealers or antagonizing his daughter during a visit to New York — there were occasional flashes of his charm, as testified by a former stripper with whom he briefly dated. “He was just so charming and so sweet,” she recalled. “I felt like I had feelings for him.”
As is their habit – and perhaps to their detriment – the Bidens have not abandoned Hunter. If anything, they drew him closer. Before the trial, he was regularly present at the White House, even attending state dinners.
Meanwhile, his second wife, Melissa, is supported in court by a rotating cast of friends, including first lady Jill Biden and the president’s sister, Valerie. Other members of Biden’s orbit present in court include Kevin Morris, an entertainment lawyer and friend of Hunter’s, Fran Person, the president’s former personal assistant, and philanthropist Bobby Sager.
President Biden, who said last week that he would not pardon his son if convicted, did not attend. Still, he was a ghostly presence: his smiling portrait hangs in the lobby of the federal courthouse in Wilmington.
Ahead of the trial, he issued a statement suggesting that even the commander-in-chief was not immune to the parental pain caused by a wayward child. “I’m the president, but I’m also a dad,” Biden said. “Jill and I love our son and are very proud of the man he is today.”
