On yet another day, Beau’s widow, Hallie Biden — who became romantically involved with Hunter after Beau died of cancer in May 2015 — walked steadily into the courtroom to testify about the turmoil that washed over the Biden family after the loss of Beau.
As Hunter Biden’s trial unfolded over the past week in his childhood town of Wilmington, his late brother Beau was a constant shadow over the proceedings. In a family that cherishes tight relationships, respects fate and faithfully memorializes tragedies, the effect of Beau’s promising life and his death at 46 was evident on many of those in the room.
Beyond that, the events that prompted the trial might not have occurred if he had lived. It was after Beau died that Hunter spiraled into what he describes as his worst battle with addiction. Prosecutors contend that it was during that stretch that Hunter, despite his ongoing addiction, falsely declared that he was not using illegal drugs when he filled out a form to buy a gun.
The defense has suggested that by the time of the gun purchase, in October 2018, Hunter was doing better and not necessarily under the influence.
“After my uncle died, things got bad,” Naomi Biden, Hunter’s oldest daughter, testified Friday during an emotional 30 minutes on the stand. But when she saw her father in Los Angeles in August 2018, she said, “he seemed like the clearest that I had seen him since my uncle died, and he just seemed really great.”
The trial, expected to wrap up in coming days, is also taking place in the state where Beau Biden served as attorney general for eight years, where police officers still recall working with him, and where he sought stronger laws around drug and cocaine use.
Beau’s presence hovers over the Biden presidency more broadly. President Biden has suggested that Beau wanted him to run for president; that he would have run in 2016 but for grief at his son’s loss; and that it is Beau who should be president.
Some of the president’s policy goals — particularly fighting cancer and helping those exposed to military burn pits — were inspired by his son, who became ill after exposure to such pits, though a direct link has never been established. And Biden owes much of his political identity as a figure of empathy to the experience of losing Beau.
The power of Beau’s presence — and absence — has been highlighted in a particularly human way by Hunter’s trial, which could conclude as early as Monday.
On Wednesday, Hunter’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, told the court that a few weeks after Beau’s death, she found a crack pipe in an ashtray on the side porch of their house. “I was worried,” she said. “Scared.”
A few months later, Hallie Biden, in grief over having lost her husband, began a romantic relationship with his brother, Hunter. That relationship deeply divided members of the family. “It was a terrible experience that I went through,” Hallie Biden testified. “I’m embarrassed and ashamed, and I regret that part of my life.”
The relationship between Hunter and Hallie is at the center of the case that prosecutors have put before the jury, a presentation that has alternated between enthralling testimony about love affairs and drug abuse and dry arguments about financial transactions and whether ATM withdrawals were used for drug deals or liquor store payments.
One of the most dramatic moments came Thursday when, at 10:12 a.m., Hallie Biden walked into the courtroom. In a black suit and white blouse, she walked past a row of spectators — including the president’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, who helped raise Hunter and Beau — as Hunter watched from the defense table.
She recounted meeting Hunter Biden when she was in middle school. She noted that she later married Beau, and that she gradually began a relationship with Hunter in late 2015, months after Beau’s death.
When she found crack cocaine around the house, she said, she had to Google it because she wasn’t sure what it was. But Hunter introduced her to the drug and they became a pair of addicts in an on-again, off-again relationship, occasionally pushing one another into rehab only to relapse.
“This can’t go on,” Hallie Biden recalled saying to Hunter at one point. “We can’t do this.”
Hunter’s drug and alcohol problems began early; by his senior year in high school he was occasionally doing cocaine, he recounted in his memoir. Just after graduation, he was caught and charged with cocaine possession. He entered a pretrial intervention that included six months of probation, allowing the arrest to be expunged from his record.
All the time, in Hunter’s account, Beau was there to help him steady himself. “I owned up to it and didn’t do coke again that summer or, really, more than a couple of times in college,” Hunter wrote. “Beau was surprised I did cocaine but he helped me get through it.”
So when his brother died, Hunter lost a central stabilizing force in his life.
So, too, did President Biden, who wears on his left wrist the rosary Beau had when he died and who often tears up when speaking about his son.
“Beau should be the one running for president, not me,” Biden said told MSNBC in 2020. He added, “Every morning I get up, I think to myself, ‘Is he proud of me?’”
Hunter Biden’s trial got underway on June 3, just days after the ninth anniversary of Beau’s death. President Biden visited Hallie’s home around that time to meet with her and her children, though White House officials said that had nothing to do with the trial where she would soon appear as a witness.
To mark the anniversary, many Biden family members attended Mass at St. Joseph on the Brandywine, where Beau is buried in the cemetery. Four days later, some of the same people were sitting in the courthouse about three miles away to watch Hunter’s trial.
The case has also put on display some of the shifts within the family. As Hallie Biden sat in the witness box, testifying about her troubled life with Hunter, she repeatedly glanced out into the gallery toward a man sitting in the second row, in the section opposite the Biden family.
The man was her new husband, whom had she married just days before the trial. When she raised her hand, a new wedding ring glistened. And when she left the courtroom, she held his hand, never looking back.
