Highlights: Gun seller takes the stand after Hunter Biden's ex-wife and former girlfriend

Lowell moved on to Cleveland’s sales practices, asking Cleveland if he convinced Hunter to buy the speed loader, hollow point ammo, BB gun and utility tool that he purchased in addition to the gun. 

Biden's lawyer asked if Cleveland was familiar with the phrase "whale hunting," which is a phrase the defense lawyer also brought up during openings as a way to portray Cleveland as someone more concerned with sales than best practices.

Cleveland laughed and said, “That’s what they called me."

After a back-and-forth with Lowell about sales tactics, Cleveland said he got paid the same salary no matter what his customers bought and insisted that Hunter Biden was the one who ultimately selected the items he purchased. 

Some context in a text message between Hunter Biden and his ex-girlfriend, Zoe Kestan, that was shown on screen. The key line Biden wrote to her: “I can be sober, but I’ll always be an addict. And the addict is as much me as the me you love to hate.”

The prosecution seemed to be focused on the statement from Biden that he would “always be an addict” as it would be relevant to the language on the form. Biden's lawyer seemed to try and address this with his cross-examination when he asked Kestan if she was familiar with Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous, and how the first thing you say is: I’m so and so, and I’m an addict.

He was trying to suggest that this text would have come during a period when he was trying to get clean.

Another round of questions seemed to be building toward a prosecution theory that Hunter Biden purchased the gun for his protection during drug deals. Prosecutor Hines asked Cleveland what came after Biden filled out the ATF form. Cleveland said they discussed other things you need with the gun, including a speed loader and ammo. 

Cleveland said they discussed two different categories of ammunition. Full metal jacket bullets which are better for usage on shooting range, and hollow bullets which are better for self-defense. Cleveland said he explained those usages to Hunter. Hunter opted for the hollow point bullets.

Hines then produced a box that he asked Cleveland to identify, containing 25-30 hollow point bullets manufactured by American Gunner that matched what Hunter Biden purchased that day. Hines showed the box to the jury, just as he did with the revolver. A photo of the box was shown on the display as well. 

Gordon Cleveland, who sold Hunter Biden the firearm, just testified that he watched Biden fill out the ATF form for gun purchases and watched him fill out the drug-related question at the heart of this case.

Cleveland said he saw Biden fill out the entire form and he saw him answer "no" to the question about drug use. The form reads, "Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?"

During opening statements yesterday, defense lawyer Abbe Lowell tried to portray Cleveland as someone who wanted to make a sale and was willing to skirt protocol to do so.

After questioning Gordon Cleveland about Hunter Biden's gun purchase, prosecutor Derek Hines introduced the gun in question into evidence.

Cleveland confirmed he sold Biden the firearm but that he didn’t know who Biden was when he walked into the store. Cleveland said that Hunter Biden told him he was looking to buy a firearm, specifically a revolver. Cleveland said he showed Hunter Biden some Rugers but that the president's son ultimately chose a Colt.

At that point, Hines introduced the physical gun into evidence, walking the revolver, in a cardboard box, up to the witness stand to have Cleveland read the serial number and confirm it was the gun he had sold to Hunter Biden. Jurors craned their necks to see the gun as Hines walked past. After Cleveland verified it was the same gun, Hines held up the gun and displayed it for the jury who all paid close attention.

Zoe Kestan's testimony has ended. The man who sold the gun to Hunter Biden, Gordon Cleveland, will be the next witness.

Kestan was asked to walk through her tumultuous relationship with Hunter Biden. She mentioned that several times over multiple months she felt it was in her own best interest to leave him. “I was really upset and emotionally distraught,” she said of the end of her time in Los Angeles. “So I went back to New York early.”

Kestan testified that she saw Biden smoking crack “every 20 minutes or so” in a Malibu home that he had rented. In the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the kitchen. “It was a big house, so kind of all over,” Kestan said.

During this testimony, Jill Biden was watching intently, her eyes darting between Wise and Kestan.

Kestan left Malibu around Sept. 22/23 to head back to the East Coast. “He yelled at me a couple times,” she said. “I felt like he isn’t giving me any attention at all. ... I told myself I should leave.” 

Wise asked her, "Did he ever say he wasn’t an addict?” She said no.

The prosecution showed a May 2018 photo that Kestan had taken of the hotel room she shared with Hunter Biden in L.A.

The photo showed half-empty liquor bottles, baking soda she said Biden used with cocaine to make crack, residue on a bowl he used to heat up the mixture, and chopsticks he used with his crack pipe. She said she was “quite angry” she had to clean up the room in that state and sent him that photo.

A courtroom sketch artist depicted the court during Hunter Biden’s trial. The woman in pink is first lady Jill Biden and to her left appears to be Melissa Cohen-Biden, Hunter Biden's wife. The man standing up to talk is Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s lawyer. On the screen is an image that appears to be a check signed by Hunter Biden.

The image below shows Zoe Kasten during her testimony.

Zoe Kestan is back on the stand, with prosecutor Leo Wise asking her about the time she moved into an Airbnb after her stay with Hunter Biden at the Chateau Marmont in L.A.

She said that they had intended to move into the Airbnb together and had packed up their things, but that was complicated by his plans to return to the East Coast for his daughter’s graduation. 

The trial has taken a break for lunch. Before the break, the government introduced more photos taken by Kestan. One showed Hunter Biden wearing a parody T-shirt that said “addicted” and showed the Adidas trefoil logo as a marijuana leaf. Kestan said she thought the shirt was funny because Hunter “didn’t smoke weed.” 

Bill Ashton, who described himself as a “longtime friend of the family," told NBC News during an earlier break that he plans to attend most of the trial's proceedings.

Ashton said he has been in court all three days so far and expressed optimism for the president's son. "I think it’s gonna go well," he said.

Ashton added that the prosecution’s case appears very straightforward, but that he found Lowell’s defense strategy very strong and “fascinating” to watch.

Before proceedings began this morning, Rev. Christopher Bullock, the pastor of the Canaan Baptist Church of New Castle, Delaware, huddled with a group of other men, including NAACP President Richard Smith and Sam Latham, a former labor leader in Delaware.

Bullock told NBC News that the huddle was a group prayer in which he had prayed "God would bless this process and justice would be done, and that the Holy Spirit would keep the family in peace.”

Bullock said he’s known the Biden family for about 30 years, adding with a laugh that he “doesn’t get to see Joe as much since he became president."

Speaking to NBC News during the short court break, Bobby Sager, a friend of Hunter's for the past two years, said he had dinner with him and his wife, Melissa Cohen-Biden, and their 4-year-old toddler, Beau Biden, and that Hunter expressed confidence and optimism.

Sager described the dinner as very relaxed, “just friends talking and hanging out.” He said he was attending trial today because he cares about "giving them hugs and letting them know lots of people love them very much.”

Asked what it was like to sit in the courtroom and listen to recordings from Hunter’s audiobook and text messages being read aloud, he said: “You hear his vulnerability."

"To see that vulnerability now on display in a way that is cruel ... It is very distressing. It is very unfair," Sager said. "Instead of people learning during this process, or being inspired by that vulnerability, they are using it in a way that is cruel, and I say that as someone who loves Hunter.”

Kestan testified about when Hunter Biden began to talk about trying to stop using drugs. He mentioned one treatment he had heard of, which involved using the venom of a particular frog and applying it to a person’s skin to get them to purge. She said that after they parted ways after their stay at the Four Seasons in New York, she sent him a couple of articles and research on this treatment.

In March 2018, Kestan said she was at dinner with her parents in Manhattan when Hunter Biden said he was in town. They met after dinner, and he took her to the 6 Columbus Hotel, where they stayed for 10 days. “I was excited to see if it had worked,” Zoe said of “Combo,” a drug that makes you stop wanting to do crack.

Prosecutors introduced Exhibit 38, a series of pictures Zoe Kestan confirmed were from her phone. They displayed one picture dated Feb. 12, 2018, on the projector for the jury that showed a hotel bathroom countertop and what Kestan identified as a used crack pipe.

Prosecutor Leo Wise noted that some of the pictures had been cropped or had redactions, although this picture did not appear to have black redaction boxes. She said Hunter Biden told her what the pipe was, and that she knew it was used because of its coloring.

She described how Biden would use the pipe, insert filters, use chopsticks and pens to push used filters out, and re-use it.

Kestan testified that Hunter Biden asked her to get cash from ATMs for him to buy drugs. He would send her temporary codes from Wells Fargo he would receive on his phone that she could use to make withdrawals without his debit card. 

“He used cash for a lot of things,” she said. “I knew a good amount of it was for buying drugs.

Notably, she also said that he would use this same process to allow drug dealers to withdraw money from his account at ATMs by sending them those temporary codes from his phone.

Zoe Kestan, the ex-girlfriend of Hunter Biden’s, testified about seeing him buy drugs for the first time. 

She described a deal with a dealer named “Frankie.” Biden told her he would be coming and asked her to bring him up from the lobby when he arrived. They sat in the living room of his suite briefly before Biden and Frankie went to a different room. 

Kestan said that she didn’t see the exchange itself happen, but said that she could say definitively that Frankie came with more drugs than he left with.

Kestan testified that Hunter Biden told her that she was a distraction from crack.

Hunter was smoking crack “every 20 minutes or so” throughout the week, she testified, adding that they were so “focused on each other” that he was maybe smoking less than usual during that time.

Hunter called her a “distraction” from crack, she said.

A week after their first encounter at the gentleman’s club in Manhattan, Zoe Kestan said she came across Hunter Biden’s picture online and realized it was the man from the private dance. Around the same time, a friend of hers who already knew Biden texted her that she was with him at the Soho Grand Hotel and asked if she wanted to come over. Kestan accepted the invitation.

Biden recognized her when she walked in the room, Kestan said. She added that he was playing “loud rock music” when she entered. 

About 10-15 minutes after she arrived at the hotel, Kestan said she saw Biden smoke crack. He offered her a hit but she declined, she said. Later that day, he offered to buy her some marijuana. She didn’t say whether she accepted that offer at the time.

Kestan said she first met Hunter Biden in Dec. 2017, while she was working “part-time” at a “gentleman’s club” in Manhattan. As she tells it, it was late at night and the club was about to close when she was asked to do one last 30-minute private dance with another girl. 

When she arrived at the private room, Biden was already there with the other dancer. Kestan said she introduced herself but didn’t get his name at the time and didn’t recognize him as Joe Biden’s son.

She described Hunter during that first meeting as “charming” and generally a really nice guy. After about 10 minutes of chatting, Biden went over to the balcony in the private room and began smoking something out of a pipe. Kestan said she didn’t know what Hunter was smoking, but assumed it was crack. Hunter was also drinking. 

Zoe Kestan is on the stand now. She's believed to be Witness #2, who the trial brief said was previously in a romantic relationship with Hunter Biden between approximately December 2017 and October 2018.

During the course of their relationship, the trial brief said, Witness #2 observed Biden using crack cocaine frequently — every 20 minutes, except when he slept.

Hunter Biden's ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, continued to testify about various times she found drugs and paraphernalia in the house and his car. 

“Did you see drugs in his car on more than one occasion?” prosecutor Leo Wise asked. She said she had.

In a brief cross-examination, Buhle detailed what life was like during her marriage with him and maintained that she did not witness him using drugs.

After saying they met at a Peace Corps trip in Chicago, where they later got married, Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell asked what his client was doing for work in 2015.

Wise sought to elicit from Buhle whether she knew of any times Hunter Biden acknowledged specifically that he had an “addiction.” 

“Did he use that word or a word like it?” Wise asked Buhle. Buhle could not recall if Hunter himself used that word, but said that his drug usage came up when they went to therapy together while still married.

“In that therapy, was it talked about as an addiction?” Wise asked. “Yes,” she answered.

Hunter Biden's ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, testified that she first became aware that he was using drugs in July 2015 when she found a crack pipe in an ashtray on their porch in Washington, D.C.

“He acknowledged smoking crack,” she said about the time she confronted Biden about the pipe. 

Hunter Biden's ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, has taken the witness stand. They were married from 1993 to 2017. She is appearing under subpoena but the prosecution said yesterday that she does not have an immunity agreement.

They have three children together.

The trial is on a break of 10–15 minutes on Day 3 as of 10:55 a.m.

Both sides have finished with FBI agent Erika Jensen’s testimony and Kathleen Buhle, Hunter’s ex-wife, is expected to take the stand after the break.

Prosecutor Derek Hines spent several minutes walking the jury through invoices and bank records that have already been introduced as evidence, pointing out what Hunter Biden paid for in cash vs. a credit card. He highlighted payments made to The View, a rehab facility in California, AirBnb payments and Oct. 2018 liquor store payments all made with a card.

“Do drug dealers accept credit cards?” Hines asked.

“Not in my experience,” Jensen replied.

The point he appears to be making here is that while Biden did make eight separate purchases at liquor stores in October 2018, that doesn’t explain what he did with all the cash he was withdrawing during the time period surrounding the gun purchase.

Before he wrapped up, Abbe Lowell directly asked FBI agent Jensen about any evidence that the laptop data had been tampered with.

“Did you find out whether any of the files had been tampered with?” he asked.

“I did not,” she said.

Getting into data on the laptop and hard drive, Lowell asked Jensen if she had any reason to believe any data was changed or altered.

“When we obtained the data, it was authentic from that point forward,” Jensen said. The laptop came into government possession in December 2019, she said.

In his questioning, Lowell is suggesting Jensen doesn’t have that much firsthand knowledge of the investigation itself, but instead has heard a lot of information from other people and sources.

Lowell went through the phrasing of questions on a background check form for purchasing a gun.

“Do you know whether the defendant checked those boxes?” Lowell asked Jensen.

“Not from my own observation,” she said. “I’m not qualified as a handwriting expert.”

He also noted the phrasing of questions on the form, with some saying, “Have you ever been,” and others merely saying, “Have you” — a point meant to emphasize that the reading of the questions could mean Hunter Biden was being truthful in saying he wasn't currently using drugs when he purchased the gun.

Lowell also questioned what appeared to be several different types of handwriting on the same form, with one date is written “10-12-18” in black ink, while further down the form, another was written in red ink as “01 05 2027,” with the zeros crossed through.

Lowell turned back to a Wells Fargo statement for Hunter’s Owasco PC account from November 2018 showing a total of $3.439 million.

“You’re not suggesting that all that money was used to buy drugs?” Lowell asked. Jensen said no.

Lowell continued to walk Jensen through a series of cash withdrawals from a bank account for Owasco P.C., Hunter’s domestic corporation.

In line with his questioning about the text messages, Lowell sought to delineate what Jensen did and did not know definitively about what the withdrawals were used for.

Hunter Biden's attorney Abbe Lowell went back to FBI agent Jensen's reading of two texts yesterday from October 2018 that Hunter Biden sent to Hallie Biden, his older brother Beau Biden's widow, with whom he had a relationship after Beau died.

One of those texts referred to waiting for a dealer named Mookie outside the Wilmington Blue Rocks stadium, said Lowell, who then asked Jensen if she knew if Mookie existed. She said she didn't.

Another text from Hunter to Hallie referenced smoking crack while sleeping in a car in Wilmington, Lowell said. He asked Jensen if she knew if Hunter was really sleeping on a car on that day. Jensen replied again said she didn't. 

In talking FBI agent Jensen through the timeline of chapters of Hunter Biden’s memoir, “Beautiful things,” his lawyer Abbe Lowell argued that his client’s drug use dropped off when he returned to the East Coast, before he purchased the handgun at a Wilmington, Del., gun store.

Lowell also focused his cross-examination of Jensen on Hunter Biden’s purchases of alcohol, not drugs, in October 2018, the same month when he bought the gun.

At least 10 of Hunter Biden’s family and friends are in the gallery today.

When Hunter Biden walked in with his wife, Melissa Cohen-Biden, she mouthed “love you” to her husband as she took her seat.

Hunter greeted his mother with a hug and kiss and had a big group hug with several men who were in the gallery supporting him. 

Day 3 of Hunter Biden's criminal trial is underway. Abbe Lowell is continuing his cross-examination of FBI agent Erika Jensen.

On the second day of Hunter Biden’s criminal gun trial, prosecutors pitted the president’s son against himself using excerpts of the audio from his memoir, “Beautiful Things,” in which he details his painful battle with addiction. NBC’s Ryan Nobles reports for "TODAY."

Hunter Biden and his mother, first lady Jill Biden, have arrived at the courthouse, where testimony from FBI agent Erika Jensen is set to resume.

We expect to pick up where we left off today with defense attorney Abbe Lowell cross-examining FBI agent Erika Jensen. After he wraps that up, prosecutors will have an opportunity for re-direct questioning.

Based on lead prosecutor Derek Hines’ opening statement, we expect Hunter’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle to take the stand after Jensen.

WILMINGTON, Del. — In a cadence that at times evoked a fish gasping for air, a lead prosecutor for the special counsel, Derek Hines, worked yesterday to hammer into place the government’s narrative that Hunter Biden was a high-functioning drug addict who lied to friends and family and ultimately broke the law when he checked a box on a government background check form that he was not a drug user during the purchase of a handgun in 2018. 

Hines leaned heavily on Hunter’s own words to characterize his habits and addiction leading up to and after the purchase, later bringing in the prosecution’s first witness, an FBI agent, who explained how the government authenticated key pieces of evidence, including files extracted from a laptop Biden abandoned at a Wilmington computer repair shop.

Several jurors took notes as the prosecution played excerpts from Biden’s 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things,” including a retelling of his first attempt to buy crack cocaine from a homeless woman in Franklin Park in Washington, D.C.

Read the full story here.

In its opening statement at Hunter Biden’s trial on federal gun charges, the prosecution told jurors the president’s son was a drug addict who illegally lied about his drug use on a government background check when he purchased a gun. But the defense argued that Hunter Biden did not “knowingly” lie on the form. NBC News’ Ryan Nobles reports.

Prosecutor Derek Hines yesterday argued during an opening statement that Hunter Biden’s ownership of a firearm was illegal due to his alleged drug use at the time of purchase, and emphasized that he was not above a law barring drug users and addicts from owning guns.

In the defense’s opening statement, attorney Abbe Lowell disputed claims that Hunter Biden was using crack around the time of the gun purchase in 2018, and said that the firearm “was never loaded” and that his client “never used it.”

First lady Jill Biden appeared in court Monday and yesterday, and sat in the audience beside Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen-Biden, on both days.