Crucial Witness in Hunter Biden Trial Has Long History With President’s Family

Hallie Biden, the onetime girlfriend of Hunter Biden and the widow of his late brother, Beau, took the stand on Thursday, the fourth day of his swiftly moving trial on charges he lied on an application to obtain a gun in October 2018.

David C. Weiss, the special counsel who has brought a separate case against Mr. Biden involving more serious tax offenses, has turned to the women closest to Mr. Biden to document his drug use, revisiting some of the most damaging episodes in the Biden family’s recent history as the campaign season intensifies.

Ms. Biden, who was closest to Mr. Biden when he bought the gun, is likely to offer the most complete accounting of actions laid out in his indictment over his claim to have been drug-free when he applied for a gun.

On Wednesday, two of Hunter Biden’s former romantic partners, his ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend, provided vivid and gut-wrenching testimony about his addiction to crack in the weeks and months before he claimed to be drug-free on a federal firearms form.

Almost all the events at issue in the trial happened in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was out of office.

A lawyer for Mr. Biden has suggested he could seek to undercut Ms. Biden’s narrative. In his opening statement on Tuesday, he drew a sharp distinction in the handling of the gun. During the 11 days that Mr. Biden owned the firearm, he never loaded it, never removed it from its lock box in his truck and never used it, Mr. Lowell said. It was his girlfriend at the time, Ms. Biden, who found the gun, removed it from the box, placed it in a pouch that contained drug residue and tossed it in a trash can.