The first day of testimony in Hunter Biden’s trial on gun-related charges kicked off Tuesday with the surreal sound of the defendant’s own voice ringing through the courtroom, narrating his descent into drug addiction, when prosecutors played the audiobook of his memoir.
It ended with bitter written words: the introduction of expletive-laced, panicked texts to Hallie Biden, his brother’s widow and his onetime girlfriend, berating her for disposing of his handgun and warning, perhaps presciently, that it might set off a federal investigation.
The government’s case against President Biden’s son — for all the drama, media swirl and complex political dynamics — is fairly straightforward: proving that Mr. Biden was abusing drugs when he filled out a federal firearms application claiming he was not an “unlawful user” of controlled substances.
Prosecutors stressed that point in their 15-minute opening statement before a packed courtroom that included Jill Biden, the first lady. Lying on a federal gun application is illegal and “nobody is allowed to lie, not even Hunter Biden,” said Derek Hines, a top deputy to the special counsel, David C. Weiss.
“Addiction may not be a choice, but lying and buying a gun is a choice,” Mr. Hines said.
“Nobody is above the law,” he added, echoing language the Justice Department has repeatedly used to justify its prosecutions of former President Donald J. Trump.
Almost all of the events covered in the trial happened in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was out of office.
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.
He implied that the present tense of the question about drug use — the verb “is” — meant the government must prove Mr. Biden was getting high at the exact time he bought the gun.
The salacious details of Mr. Biden’s private life have made him a fixture of the tabloids and an irresistible target for Republicans. But Mr. Lowell, banging the podium for emphasis, urged jurors to focus on the nuances of the case, and emphasized that while Mr. Biden was addicted to crack cocaine from 2015 to 2019, he had sporadic periods of sobriety when he could credibly claim to be drug-free. The law, he said, was not intended to punish “mistakes.”
Mr. Lowell, speaking for about 45 minutes, drew a sharp distinction in the handling of the gun as well as other stand-alone prosecutions of violations on a gun application, which often entail violence or other criminal activity. After Mr. Biden bought the gun, he never loaded it, never removed it from its lock box in his truck and never used it during the 11 days he owned it, Mr. Lowell said.
It was his girlfriend at the time, Hallie Biden, who found the gun, removed it from the box, placed it in a pouch that contained drug residue and tossed it in a trash can at a nearby grocery store. And Mr. Biden was not happy she did so.
“Did you take that from me, Hallie?” Mr. Biden texted after learning she had taken the gun from the lock box because she feared he might kill himself with it. “Are you insane. Tell me now. This is no game.”
Later, after he was contacted by the local police, he suggested that the weapon might be discovered by the F.B.I., which he referred to using an expletive.
“It’s hard to believe anyone is that stupid,” he added.
Ms. Biden is expected to be called as a witness for the prosecution, perhaps as early as Wednesday. Mr. Lowell suggested he might sharply question her version of events on cross-examination.
For the first two days of the trial, Hunter Biden’s family watched attentively from the row of seats right behind him. At one point, when his lawyer spoke about support from his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, in helping him maintain his sobriety, Mr. Biden turned around to look at them.
If prosecutors began with a focused outline of their case, their presentation soon slowed with the testimony of their first witness, an F.B.I. agent who served as a kind of docent. The agent, Erika Jensen, guided the jury through exhibits and played extended audio clips of Mr. Biden reading chapters of “Beautiful Things,” his autobiography, detailing his addiction to crack at the time he bought the gun.
The sound of Mr. Biden’s voice, piped in through speakers as he listened tight-lipped, was jarring and it initially transfixed the courtroom. But after about a half-hour, attention drifted, even, it seemed, among prosecutors.
At one point, Mr. Hines asked Ms. Jensen, “We’re still in Chapter Eight, right?”
The trial, which is expected to last about a week, promises to be an excruciating personal ordeal for the Biden family.
On Tuesday, Mr. Hines said prosecutors planned to summon Ms. Biden and another woman Mr. Biden was romantically involved with, Zoe Kestan, in addition to his former wife, Kathleen Buhle, who is likely to testify first.
He also plans to call Gordon Cleveland, an employee at the Delaware gun store where Mr. Biden bought his weapon, and two expert witnesses who will testify on drug residue and other forensic evidence.
The purpose is to provide witness testimony to fill in gaps left by dozens of documents and texts — some extracted from Mr. Biden’s lost laptop computer — which the government presented to the jury Tuesday afternoon.
Ms. Jensen painstakingly posted texts from Mr. Biden and the people who sold, or obtained, crack for him on screens throughout the courtroom, painting a picture of a desperate man who seemed to spend every waking minute in mid-2018 hunting for drugs.
She juxtaposed those patterns with his cash withdrawals that averaged a staggering $50,000 a month that fall, in an effort to connect his runaway spending to his out-of-control addiction. That included a $5,000 withdrawal on Oct. 12, 2018, the day he bought the weapon.
Mr. Lowell, who began his cross-examination of the F.B.I. agent as the session on Tuesday neared a close, seized on the government’s lack of evidence, such as frantic texts to his dealers around the time of the gun purchase, to prove the withdrawals were linked to drug deals.
If the government was using more than 60 text messages between Mr. Biden and someone else on Feb. 26, 2019, to establish that he was using drugs, there was nothing like that in October, supporting the defense’s argument that Mr. Biden was not an unlawful user of drugs when he filled out the federal form to purchase his gun.
Mr. Biden is charged with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the federal firearms application used to screen applicants and possessing an illegally obtained gun in October 2018. He faces a separate trial in Los Angeles this fall on tax charges.
If convicted on the three gun-related charges, 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.
