Here’s the latest on the trial, now in its third day. (2024)

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Here’s the latest on the trial, now in its third day.

Ms. Buhle is one of three women expected to testify about their relationships with Mr. Biden and his struggles with alcoholism and addiction. The remaining witnesses will include Hallie Biden, the widow of his brother, Beau, who is his onetime girlfriend, and Zoe Keston, who dated Mr. Biden from December 2017 to October 2018.

The presence of Mr. Biden’s family and friends, including his mother, Jill Biden, who appeared on Wednesday in a hot pink pantsuit, has underscored how the trial is all but certain to be a painful and personal ordeal for President Biden’s family.

Here’s what else to know:

• On Tuesday, prosecutors presented texts that showed Hunter Biden’s desperate scramble to obtain crack cocaine in the spring and summer of 2018. A day later, in his cross-examination, Mr. Lowell was able to get an F.B.I. agent to admit that none of the material covered his activity in the fall.

• Mr. Biden is charged with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the federal firearms application and possessing an illegally obtained gun in October 2018. If convicted, Mr. Biden could face up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. But nonviolent first-time offenders who have not been accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely receive serious prison time for the charges.

• The government’s case turns on a relatively straightforward question: whether Mr. Biden was abusing drugs when he filled out the federal firearms application claiming he was not an “unlawful user” of controlled substances. “Addiction may not be a choice, but lying and buying a gun is a choice,” Derek Hines, a top deputy to Mr. Weiss, told jurors on Tuesday.

• Mr. Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said he would disprove the government’s core contention that Mr. Biden “knowingly” broke the law by answering “no” on a question asking applicants whether they were using drugs at the time they sought to purchase a gun.

• The trial is one of two that Mr. Biden faces this year. The other, expected to begin in Los Angeles in September, centers on a series of tax offenses related to Mr. Biden’s failure to file returns for a number of years.

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Zach Montague contributed reporting.

Part of the government’s case will rely on the testimony of Hunter Biden’s ex-wife.

By then their marriage was already over. In 2015, two months after her husband’s brother, Beau Biden, died of cancer, Ms. Buhle asked Hunter Biden to move out of their house in Washington. His behavior had become erratic, and his affairs impossible to ignore.

Soon after, Mr. Biden entered a relationship with her sister-in-law, Hallie Biden, Beau Biden’s widow. The special counsel in the case, David C. Weiss, has also signaled he intends to call Ms. Biden.

After initial discussions over their divorce settlement were acrimonious, the two settled amicably, though Mr. Biden has paid only a fraction of the spousal support he had promised.

The two were already divorced at the time of the gun purchase, but Ms. Buhle shared custody of the couple’s three children and repeatedly expressed concerns about Mr. Biden’s behavior. She said she would search his car for drugs or paraphernalia to ensure that they were not exposed to the dark side of his life, according to her memoir.

In recent years, she has survived a bout with colon cancer, worked as an executive at a nonprofit organization in Washington and written about coping with close family members who are addicted to drugs and alcohol.

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Here are the felony charges Hunter Biden faces in the gun case.

Just bringing the charges is out of the ordinary in some ways, former law enforcement officials say, and the legal basis of the prosecution is under constitutional challenge.

The indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Wilmington, Del., charged Mr. Biden with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail; making a false claim on the federal firearms application used to screen applicants, with a sentence of up to five years; and possession of an illegally obtained gun from Oct. 12-23, 2018, which carries a maximum of 10 years.

The charges stem from the purchase of a handgun by Mr. Biden at one of the low points of his troubled life. He had been addicted to crack cocaine, bouncing in and out of rehab, was divorced, using prostitutes and having money problems. The New York Times reported last year that Mr. Biden later recounted to friends going into the gun store on a whim and buying the .38 because he thought spending time at a shooting range would help him avoid using drugs.

In purchasing the gun, Mr. Biden had to fill out a form for a federal background check. In response to a question on the form about whether he was using drugs, Mr. Biden said he was not — an assertion that prosecutors concluded was false.

The first two charges against Mr. Biden are essentially the same — that he lied about his drug use to illegally obtain the weapon, and that he falsely claimed that he was not “addicted to any stimulant, narcotic drug, and any other controlled substance” on the federal form, known as a 4473.

The third charge, illegal possession of the gun while under the influence of drugs, stems from the time he had the weapon. Hallie Biden, his brother Beau’s widow — and his romantic partner at the time — eventually discovered the gun and threw it into a dumpster.

The section of federal law cited in the indictment, 18 U.S. Code § 922, is the main statute used to define who can and cannot possess a firearm. It bars drug users, people convicted of felonies whose punishment exceeds a one-year prison sentence, fugitives from justice, people judged to be “mentally defective,” and those receiving dishonorable discharges from the military.

Rules banning electronics in the courtroom make speedy reporting on Hunter Biden’s trial tricky.

Reporters in the courtroom will be taking handwritten notes. They cannot bring any electronics into the building except whatever fits in a small lockable pouch provided by the U.S. Marshals — usually one or two cellphones. The bag allows reporters to keep their devices on site but not to use them.

To update their editors from the trial, reporters will have to leave the building to use their phones or laptops. They will not be allowed back inside the courtroom if they leave before a scheduled break.

Like at most courts, there will be an overflow room for journalists to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit monitors. Some federal buildings allow reporters to use their phones and computers from the overflow room, but that is not the case for Mr. Biden’s trial.

With very limited exceptions, reporters are not allowed to record the proceedings, even from the overflow room. To get the exact words used in the courtroom, journalists and the public alike have to purchase a transcript from the court reporter, who charges by the page. Rates depend on how quickly the transcript is needed and whether anyone else has already purchased it, ranging from 70 cents to $8 a page.

But every courthouse is different. That small pouch for the cellphones in Delaware seems like an indulgence compared to the restrictions at a courthouse handling one of former President Donald J. Trump’s cases.

At the Alto Lee Adams Sr. building in Fort Pierce, Fla., which is hosting Mr. Trump’s case regarding the mishandling of national security documents, reporters cannot bring in any electronics at all. (When I go there, I pack my electronics in a cooler that I keep in the trunk of my rental car so they don’t overheat.)

But reporters who covered Mr. Trump’s trial in Manhattan had it relatively easy: They were allowed to sit in the press area of the courtroom and use their laptops to take notes, write and send material to their editors. Still, they could not use their phones, even for texting.