Day: June 5, 2024

Wilmington, United States — Jurors at Hunter Biden’s trial heard testimony Wednesday from an FBI agent who investigated the U.S president’s son for allegedly buying a handgun while using crack cocaine.

On Tuesday the court heard that Hunter Biden — the first child of a sitting U.S. president to be prosecuted — was a heavy drug user and allegedly lied about this on the paperwork when purchasing the firearm.

He is also on trial in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware — his family’s political heartland — for illegal possession of the firearm, which he had for just 11 days in October 2018.

FBI Special Agent Erika Jensen testified how investigators retrieved evidence, including photographs apparently showing drugs, from a now infamous abandoned laptop that has been at the heart of Republican efforts to discredit the Biden family.

Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, could take the stand after Jensen according to the outline of the case given by the prosecution on Tuesday.

First Lady Jill Biden, was again in court Wednesday, as she has been for every day of the trial, while President Joe Biden has issued a statement saying he is “proud” of his son.

The case has been a distraction for Biden’s reelection campaign against Donald Trump. The president was in France on Wednesday to attend World War II D-Day commemorations and is in the midst of rolling out major initiatives on illegal migration into the United States and a proposed truce for Gaza.

The trial comes just days after Trump was convicted in a New York court on business fraud charges.

On Tuesday, the prosecutor in Wilmington played extracts from an audio version of Hunter Biden’s memoir “Beautiful Things,” recorded by Biden himself, in which he recalled his descent into addiction, when he would desperately seek out crack cocaine.

“I cooked [crack] and smoked. I cooked and smoked,” said the extract played to the court, taken from his audiobook.

But Hunter Biden’s lawyer said that he “was not using drugs when he bought that gun” and that it “was never loaded, never carried, never used” during the 11 days he owned it.

Biden, a Yale-trained lawyer and lobbyist-turned-artist, has stated that he has been sober since 2019.

The legal woes have reopened painful emotional wounds for the Biden family, stemming from his time as a drug addict and well before.

His brother Beau died from cancer in 2015, and his sister Naomi died as an infant in a 1972 car crash that also killed their mother, Neilia, Joe Biden’s first wife. Hunter and Beau were the only survivors of the accident.

If found guilty, Hunter Biden could face 25 years in prison, although as a first-time offender, jail time is unlikely.

The president’s son has long been the target of hard-right Republicans trying to embarrass Joe Biden, and Trump allies have investigated him at length in Congress on allegations of corruption and influence-peddling. No charges have ever been brought.

Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China and Ukraine have also formed the basis for attempts by Republican lawmakers to initiate impeachment proceedings against his father. Those efforts too have gone nowhere.

The White House said last year that there would be no presidential pardon for Hunter Biden in case of a conviction.

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The German government has agreed to allocate $1.5 billion in Holocaust reparations this year, setting a new record for how much the country is spending to support survivors.

The increase from a total of $1.4 billion last year is due to a rise in the amount the government is paying to reimburse survivors’ medical expenses. But the sum paid directly to survivors has once again declined, reflecting the accelerating deaths of survivors.

And the growth in the total package is expected to end soon as the number of living survivors plummets, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, known as the Claims Conference, the group that negotiates reparations with the German government.

Earlier this year, the group said it had conducted a thorough review of remaining survivors, including those who have not received reparations through its efforts, and found that about 245,000 were alive, with the median age being 85.

“We have negotiated a huge increase because survivors need more help. More survivors are coming forward and they are getting older and more disabled,” Gregg Schneider, the Claims Conference’s executive vice president, wrote in an email. “However, sadly, we project these needs plateauing as the cruelty of mortality rates cannot be stopped. By 2026, the needs will level off.”

The $1.5 billion set aside this year is broken into three categories: $500 million in direct reparations, a decrease from last year; $972 million to support the care needs of an increasingly elderly cohort of survivors; and $40 million for Holocaust education.

The Claims Conference negotiated support for Holocaust education for the first time in 2022. That figure has quadrupled and the organization now says it has negotiated further increases in the amount allocated for Holocaust education through 2028. It expects that number to grow as other reparations spending falls.

“We recognize that the day when all of our firsthand witnesses are no longer with us is closing in,” Schneider said. “This gives more urgency to our work, not just negotiations, but Holocaust education and social campaigns that capture the testimony of survivors in a format that reaches younger generations more thoroughly.”

Efforts to overhaul Holocaust education, which has historically centered on first-person testimonies by survivors, are taking a range of new forms, including, increasingly, through virtual reality and AI-generated content.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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