Jill Biden still harbors suspicions about a woman who testified against her son Hunter during his 2024 federal gun trial, and she isn't shy about saying so in her new memoir, even as she simultaneously argues the whole prosecution was tainted by politics.
The former First Lady's forthcoming book, View from the East Wing, arrives in bookstores Tuesday. A copy obtained by the Daily Mail reveals Biden devoted extensive diary-style entries to the days surrounding the Wilmington, Delaware, gun trial, entries that mix a mother's grief over addiction with pointed skepticism about how the evidence against her son came to exist.
The contradiction at the heart of the account is worth pausing on. Biden questions the motives of a trial witness and the photographs she took. She questions the impartiality of the Justice Department. She questions whether politics drove the prosecution. What she never questions is the sweeping presidential pardon her husband issued in December 2024, the one that ensured Hunter Biden would never face sentencing after a jury convicted him on all three felony counts.
Biden never names the woman she suspects. She refers only to "a woman I'd never seen before" who testified about staying with Hunter at hotels in 2018 and buying him drugs. That woman was Zoë Kestan, who met Hunter Biden in December 2017 at New York's Vivid Cabaret, a gentlemen's club where she performed.
During the trial, prosecutors showed jurors photographs Kestan had taken of crack pipes, including an image of Hunter in a bathtub holding one. Biden wrote that the images struck her as oddly professional.
"She had taken well-framed, well-lit pictures of the drug scale, of the drugs, of her and Hunter together with the drugs, almost as if she was filming a nature documentary."
Biden added a more pointed observation about the photographs' very existence:
"I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but I was sitting there thinking, Do drug users often get their fellow drug users to pose with drugs?"
She offered no evidence that Kestan fabricated anything or acted at anyone's direction. The jury, which heard the testimony firsthand, convicted Hunter on June 11, 2024, on all three felony charges related to his illegal purchase of a firearm, specifically, whether he lied about being addicted to drugs on the purchase form.
Biden acknowledged that addiction was a subject the family long avoided confronting head-on. Hunter Biden became addicted to crack cocaine in the aftermath of his brother Beau's death in 2015. The former First Lady admitted the family often wouldn't even use the word "addict" when describing what plagued Hunter.
"Even now, I can barely say the words, 'My son was a drug addict.' Barely."
She called the "horror of addiction" a "steep learning curve" and said she never took on addiction as a public cause during her time as First Lady. "I couldn't," she wrote. She explained that she was raised to stay "stoic and contained" and believed Hunter "would get it together on his own."
That instinct, to look away, to trust that things would resolve, is one many families of addicts will recognize. But the Biden family was not any family. They occupied the White House. And the decision to avoid the subject publicly while Hunter's legal exposure mounted had consequences that extended well beyond the family dinner table.
Biden described how reminders of Hunter's worst days still surface. "The other day, I was cleaning out a drawer and found one of Hunter's lighters, and I was instantly triggered," she wrote. "How many times had I seen him using it, obsessively smoking cigarettes?" Hunter Biden marked seven years of sobriety on Monday.
The memoir's trial sections read like diary entries. Biden detailed her official travel schedule, which included two trips to France wedged between days spent in the Wilmington courtroom. She recalled prosecutors playing the audiobook version of Hunter's 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things.
In one excerpt played for the jury, Hunter described being strung out on the road, lost in the California desert. An owl flew overhead, and he followed it.
"Beau, I thought. Whether the owl was real or a hallucination, I believed that the spirit of Beau was at work trying to guide his brother to safety."
Biden wrote that the passage made her daughter Ashley cry in the courtroom. She said her role during the trial was to keep Ashley and Hunter's wife, Melissa Cohen, calm, though Melissa was still caught on camera accosting former Trump aide Garrett Ziegler, who attended the proceedings. Biden did not name Ziegler in her book.
She also wrote candidly about Hallie Biden, Beau's widow, who dated Hunter during the height of his crack cocaine addiction. Hallie was called to testify and married John Hopkins Anning during the trial itself.
"I was happy for them, but I found it overwhelming to see her starting a new life with someone else. In my mind, she would always be Beau's wife, no matter her new marriage or what had occurred with Hunter."
The most revealing passages in Biden's account aren't the ones about Kestan's photographs or the owl in the desert. They're the ones about the Justice Department.
Biden wrote that she found it "hard not to think about the role politics played in the matter going to trial in the first place." She took aim at Attorney General Merrick Garland's handling of the case:
"In the end, it felt like in working so hard to be impartial, we guaranteed that Hunter would meet the worst possible legal fate."
She also suggested that her husband bent too far in the other direction: "Joe might have gone too far, in my opinion, to show that his family was being treated with complete impartiality."
Read those lines carefully. The former First Lady's complaint is not that the Justice Department was biased against Hunter. Her complaint is that Garland's effort to appear fair, to avoid the appearance of favoritism toward the president's son, resulted in a prosecution she considers unjust. The implication is that a properly calibrated DOJ would have found a way to spare Hunter the trial altogether.
That argument might land differently if Joe Biden hadn't issued a sweeping pardon in December 2024, after Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. Hunter was convicted by a jury on all three felony counts. He never faced sentencing. The pardon wiped the slate clean.
So the sequence, laid out plainly: Biden complained that Garland was too impartial. Her husband then used the most partial power available to a president, the pardon, to erase the verdict. And now, in her memoir, she questions the credibility of a witness whose testimony a jury found persuasive enough to convict.
Biden's doubts about Kestan's photographs are not backed by any factual claim in the memoir. She did not allege that anyone directed Kestan to take the photos. She did not suggest a conspiracy by name. She simply noted that the images looked too polished for a drug user's casual snapshots and left the insinuation hanging.
That is a familiar move from a family that spent years insisting Hunter's business dealings were above board, that the laptop was Russian disinformation, and that the president never discussed his son's overseas ventures, claims that aged poorly under scrutiny.
The memoir's real function is not to settle questions about the trial. It is to reframe the narrative for a sympathetic audience. The Bidens are cast as victims of an overzealous system. The witness is cast as suspicious. The attorney general is cast as someone who tried too hard to be fair. And the pardon, the one act that definitively shielded Hunter from accountability, barely registers.
Accountability, in the Biden telling, is something that happened to them. Never something they owed the public.