Text messages highlighted by federal prosecutors revealed Hunter Biden's interaction with a drug dealer before his gun purchase.
Text messages highlighted by federal prosecutors during Hunter Biden's trial revealed that he tried to meet up with a since-convicted drug dealer to buy a .38-calibre revolver. This happened a day before he lied about using crack cocaine.
Hunter allegedly asked a contact to “[m]eet me 7/11 at 3” on the evening of October 11, 2018. Reportedly, the first son had spent the previous two days trying to arrange a meeting with someone who was saved in his contacts as ‘Q.'
“Can you meet me @ 7/11 now[?],” Hunter asked on the afternoon of Oct. 10, 2018. He was told that ‘Q,' who also called himself ‘Jr,' would not be able to make it right away.
It is unclear if Hunter and Q ever met before the first son on October 12, 2018, allegedly stopped in at Starquest Shooters & Survival Supply in Wilmington.
Who is ‘Q'?
According to the Daily Mail, Hunter's contact is a person named Eladio Otero Jr. In June last year, he pleaded guilty to one count of using a communication device to facilitate a drug conspiracy as part of a deal with Delaware federal prosecutors. The man was subsequently sentenced to 15 months in prison, as well as a year of supervised release.
This was not all in Otero's rap sheet. In 2010, he was convicted of second-degree assault in Maryland in connection with an armed robbery in 2007.
After the text messages were revealed, prosecutor Derek Hines noted that Hunter referenced the convenience store “both before and after the gun purchase.” This suggested that this was a spot that he regularly visited to buy the drug.
However, defence attorney Abbe Lowell noted that the messages sent before Hunter allegedly bought the gun had no location data to confirm his whereabouts. “Was he going to meet Q or getting a cup of coffee?” he asked Erika Jensen, who had taken the stand to counter defence claims that the first son was not addicted to the drug at the time he bought the weapon.
“I don't know,” said Jensen, who reportedly analysed evidence from Hunter's laptop. “I have no further context.”
As per emails recovered from Hunter's hard drive, he withdrew 800 from his Wells Fargo checking account on October 11 evening. This information is damning as Hunter's ex-girlfriend Zoe Kestan previously testified that he often removed huge amounts of cash to purchase drugs.
Data from a text Hunter sent to his sister-in-law and lover Hallie Biden showed that he was at the 7-Eleven about an hour later, on October 16, 2018. “Sometimes we had text messages without location data,” Lowell said to Jensen. “Sometimes we had location data without text messages.”
Three witnesses, including Hunter's daughter Naomi, were called by the defence before they rested their case on Monday, June 10.
