Under cross-examination, government lawyers elicited anguished, and excruciating, details about their relationship at the time.
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Naomi Biden, left, hoped to bolster her father’s contention that he was working hard to kick his addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol in 2018.
Hunter Biden’s daughter Naomi testified on Friday that her father was sober and “hopeful” in mid-2018, right before he claimed to be drug-free on a gun application — but that claim was quickly undercut by her own anguished texts saying he had driven her to the breaking point.
Ms. Biden, 30, a lawyer in Washington, took the stand hoping to bolster Mr. Biden’s contention that he was working hard to kick his addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol. She said he was “the clearest” she had seen him in years when visiting him in Los Angeles in August 2018.
But under an intense cross-examination, her claim seemed to crumble. Prosecutors read aloud her texts from mid-October, when Mr. Biden visited New York City, where Ms. Biden was living with her boyfriend and entering her second year of law school.
The exchanges painted a starkly different picture of his behavior. Mr. Biden ignored Ms. Biden’s desperate texts for hours and made a bizarre request when he did resurface, at one point asking her boyfriend to drop off keys to a borrowed truck at 2 a.m. in Midtown Manhattan before disappearing again.
ImageHunter Biden and his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, arriving at the courthouse on Friday.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
“I’m sorry daddy, I can’t take this, I don’t know what to say,” she wrote to him on Oct. 18 — at a moment when he was buying crack and partying with a girlfriend, according to previous evidence introduced by the government.
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Source: nytimes.com