Bombshell text messages Hunter exchanged with drug dealer

Smoking gun text messages show Hunter set up a meeting with a convicted drug dealer the night before he bought a .38 revolver. He purchased the Colt Cobra .38 Special revolver on October 12, 2018 by claiming on a federal form that he wasn’t abusing drugs – a lie for which he is now on trial in Delaware .

The day before the gun purchase, Hunter texted violent, convicted drug dealer Eladio Otero Jr. to ‘meet me 7/11 at 3’, according to records from the First Son’s abandoned laptop . Otero was convicted last year of ‘use of a communication device to facilitate a drug conspiracy’ in a Delaware federal case overseen by David Weiss, who is now the Special Counsel prosecuting Hunter.

Otero was previously convicted of assault after being arrested for a 2007 armed robbery in which he held a knife to the victim’s throat while his accomplice pointed a gun at the man’s head, according to a Maryland police report. Hunter’s texts with the dealer have not yet been shown to the Wilmington, Delaware jury he currently faces. The prosecution rested their case on Friday morning, so it is unclear whether government attorneys will have a chance to show the jury the texts – or whether they are even aware of the incriminating messages.

But the smoking gun messages appear to shatter any doubt that the First Son was using drugs when he bought his gun . At 12:16 p.m. on October 9, 2018, Hunter received a text from a Delaware number ending 2168 that matches cell phone records for Otero obtained by DailyMail.com. ‘Hey this jr the one you got that at the711,’ Otero wrote. ‘Can you meet me @ 7/11 now,’ Hunter replied the next day at 9:47 a.m.

‘I have get off at330 i can call you when i am on my way,’ Otero replied. ‘K’ Hunter said. ‘Ight. You want the same,’ Otero wrote. Then at 12:17am on October 11, someone texted Hunter from the same 2168 number calling themselves ‘Q’. ‘Its. Q. Im. At. 711. Now’. A few minutes later, they added: ‘Pls. Come. Through. Or. Call. Jon. Jon. # my. Folks. Saw. U. Not. Too. Long. Coming. By. 711’.

Hunter’s emails include a receipt from Wells Fargo saying he withdrew $800 at 6:30 p.m. on October 11 at an ATM labeled ‘Rittenhouse’ – likely near to Rittenhouse Station, a University of Delaware student apartment building in Newark, Delaware. The data showed Hunter was setting up a drug deal the day before he bought his gun at StarQuest Shooters in Wilmington. Other texts show Hunter regularly set up drug deals or found contacts for crack cocaine hookups at 7/11 stores.

On October 13, 2018 – the day after the gun purchase – he texted his then-lover and brother’s widow Hallie Biden, saying he was with ‘Bernard who hangs at 7/11!on Greenhill and Lancaster I’m now off MD Av behind blue rocks stadium waiting for a dealer named Mookie.’ Hunter’s hotshot attorney Abbe Lowell has argued in court that Hunter’s texts to Hallie, about meeting a dealer and being ‘on a car smoking crack’ in the two days after he bought his gun, were lies Hunter told her to conceal his whereabouts . But his legal team cannot use the same excuse with these smoking gun texts with a convicted drug dealer from October 11.

On Friday, the jury heard from a senior Drug Enforcement Administration agent who said Hunter’s large and frequent cash withdrawals were likely used for drugs, at least in part. In the past week, Special Counsel Weiss’ prosecutors have been trying to prove to the jury that Hunter was an addict or drug abuser when he ticked the box claiming he wasn’t on a federal form to buy his gun. Lying on the Form 4473 is a felony, as is possession of a firearm while addicted to drugs – the charges he currently faces. The dealer he was texting on October 11, Otero, was a particularly unsavory character.

A 2007 story in a local news site for Cecil County , Maryland, referenced a police report saying that Otero, then 22, and accomplice Jerimiah Leone ‘broke into a man’s home, beat him with a gun and held a knife to his throat during a violent robbery.' ‘Leone then pointed the gun at [victim Eugene Lai’s] head and said he wanted all his money. When [Lai’s friend Robert] Stokes told Leone he didn’t have any of the things Leone wanted, Otero pulled out a knife and held it to Stokes’ throat,’ the June 2007 story in the Cecil Whig said. Otero took the cash in Lai’s wallet and fled. The victims called police, who chased down Otero and found him with Lai’s wallet, the police report said.

Otero cut a plea deal in 2010 for second degree assault. He was also indicted in June 2022 with ‘drug conspiracy to possess a controlled substance with the intent to distribute’ by then-Delaware US Attorney David Weiss. Weiss’s office was at least three years into an investigation of Hunter Biden at the time, after obtaining his abandoned laptop in December 2019 . It is unclear whether they ever connected Otero with the President’s son.

Otero ultimately pleaded guilty to ‘use of a communication device to facilitate a drug conspiracy’ in a case with several other defendants and was convicted on June 1 last year, with a sentence of 15 months’ imprisonment and one year of supervised release. In his May 2023 sentencing memo , Weiss’s Assistant US Attorney Kevin Pierce wrote that Otero ‘played an integral part' in a wide-scale drug trafficking organization, which led to large seizures of cocaine, marijuana, firearms, and United States currency.

‘The defendant’s drug dealing placed himself, and numerous others, at risk,’ Pierce wrote. ‘The defendant has a lengthy criminal history, which includes numerous prior drug offenses and a history of violent behavior. ‘The defendant’s continuing use and sale of drugs, despite the convictions and years of supervision, indicates a willingness to recidivate [reoffend] and disregard for the law.’

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