Hunter Biden Is on Trial, but All Eyes Are on the Biden Women
The New York Times
The women called to testify have at different times tried to support a man whose history of addiction continues to hit them with shrapnel.
One by one, the women drifted into the courthouse: The wife. The ex-wife. The daughter. The sister-in-law who, through the fog of tragedy and drug abuse, ended up an ex-girlfriend.
Once inside the courtroom, they locked their eyes past the many strangers who watched them — people who wondered if they would break down, or say the wrong thing. If they would cry.
Hunter Biden is the one on criminal trial, staring down gun charges. But the spectacle in the courtroom has forced the Biden women into an uncomfortable spotlight.
In the family, public life has often revolved around the men. The women called to testify had, at different points, tried to support and protect the one who was the troubled husband, father and son — and whose ruinous history of addiction continues to hit them with shrapnel. The women who didn’t speak sat in the courtroom, playing parts of nurturers and sentinels.
The pain of this responsibility was written on the face of Hunter Biden’s eldest daughter, Naomi Biden Neal, who testified on his behalf on Friday.
“He seemed great,” a nervous-sounding Ms. Biden Neal, dressed in black with her hair pulled back, told the court on Friday. “He seemed hopeful.”
A businessman in the Bronx falsified information on thousands of returns, committing one of the largest tax frauds in Department of Justice history, prosecutors said.
Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.
The president-elect’s latest attempt to overturn his Manhattan conviction was rebuffed by the judge overseeing the case, who called it “mere hearsay and conjecture.”
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
The man whom authorities call a serial killer was charged with second-degree murder in the case of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
The police in Wisconsin are working to establish a motive for the attack, which left a student and teacher dead and six others injured.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday. Investigators have been trying to tie him to other unsolved killings on Long Island.
Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, hampering his re-election bid.
He built Mississippi’s Republican Party into a conservative powerhouse, making himself a regional power broker in the process.