By Tom Ozimek
Attorneys for President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, have accused “reckless” federal prosecutors of tarnishing their client’s reputation by publicly releasing a photograph showing lines of sawdust that they misrepresented as cocaine.
Mr. Biden’s attorneys, Abbe Lowell and Bartholomew Dalton, made the allegation that prosecutors were misrepresenting evidence in a Feb. 20 court filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, where their client was indicted on three felony counts of making false statements to a gun dealer and possessing a firearm while using drugs.
Mr. Biden has pleaded not guilty to all three charges, for which he could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
In their latest filing, Mr. Biden’s attorneys accuse special counsel David Weiss of waging an “unnecessary fight about tangential issues” in pushing back on requests by Mr. Biden to provide him with all pertinent discovery materials that they say he needs to prepare his defense.
“For all its bluster, there is nothing improper nor out of the ordinary for Mr. Biden to make the same request that virtually every defendant makes, asking that the prosecution give him all the information that he is due so that he can prepare for and receive a fair trial,” they wrote.
Mr. Weiss said in a Feb. 13 filing that his office had already provided Mr. Biden with over 1.2 million pages of documents and that he has either failed to review them or has “misrepresented” what prosecutors have provided.
‘Hyperbolic and Sensational Claim’
Mr. Biden’s attorneys alleged in their latest filing that prosecutors have been “gun-shy” about confirming that they have met their discovery obligations.
They added that Mr. Biden’s concerns that he may not be getting a fair trial have grown “as the defense has increasingly come to realize the scope of the prosecution’s ‘curious’ investigative techniques.”
One example of these “curious” techniques that Mr. Biden’s lawyers cite is the prosecution’s alleged heavy reliance on a brown leather pouch that prosecutors allege belonged to Mr. Biden and that contained cocaine residue. Police obtained the pouch from a garbage scavenger who pulled it from a public trash can.
“The prosecution treats this evidence as its smoking gun but, if that were so (despite the pouch’s questionable provenance), it is dumbfounding that the prosecution waited five years before testing it for narcotics,” Messrs. Dalton and Lowell wrote in the filing.
Another example they gave was a photograph that Mr. Weiss included as an exhibit attached to a public Feb. 13 court filing that he claimed was one of “multiple photographs of videos apparent cocaine, crack cocaine, and drug paraphernalia.”
The photograph shows three lines of yellow dust arranged on a carpenter’s table saw workbench that look like lines of cocaine but that Mr. Biden’s attorneys say aren’t.
The defense attorneys said the picture was sent to Mr. Biden by his psychiatrist, who they say told him they were “lines of sawdust sent to me by a master carpenter who was a coke addict.”
The message and the photograph were “meant to convey that Mr. Biden, too, could overcome any addiction,” the defense attorneys wrote, while alleging that the misrepresentation of the sawdust as cocaine is another example that “amplifies why Mr. Biden and the Court cannot take the prosecution’s assertions at face value.”
“The prosecution was reckless in making such a hyperbolic and sensational claim in a public filing, which it surely realized would prejudice Mr. Biden in the public eye,” the defense attorneys wrote.
“Mistaking sawdust for cocaine sounds more like a storyline from one of the 1980s Police Academy comedies than what should be expected in a high-profile prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice,” they contended.
Mr. Lowell told some media outlets that the defense team’s latest motion shows that Mr. Weiss has gone to “extreme lengths” to bring charges against Mr. Biden that wouldn’t have been brought against someone else. He called for the case to be dismissed.
A spokesperson for Mr. Weiss’s office said that the special counsel had no comment on the allegations.
Smirnov Allegations
In seeking to cast doubt on the prosecution’s conduct in the case, Mr. Biden’s attorneys also alleged that allegations made against Mr. Biden by an FBI informant who’s been charged with providing the bureau with false information about their client also tainted the investigation.
A federal grand jury charged Alexander Smirnov on Feb. 14, accusing him of making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record.
Mr. Smirnov told the FBI in 2020 that the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings hired Mr. Biden to “protect” the company, “through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” and that Burisma gave $5 million to each of the Bidens.
All this was supposedly so that Mr. Biden would “take care of all those issues through his dad,” Mr. Smirnov said, with “dad” referring to President Biden, father of Mr. Biden.
These revelations, however, turned out to be “fabrications,” according to the indictment.
Mr. Biden was on the board of Burisma while his father was the U.S. vice president between January 2009 and January 2017.
In their latest filing, Mr. Biden’s attorneys contended that, because Mr. Weiss was investigating Mr. Smirnov’s allegations at the same time as negotiations were underway for a plea deal with their client, “it now seems clear that the Smirnov allegations infected this case.”
The plea deal fell apart, with Mr. Biden’s attorneys alleging it had to do with Mr. Smirnov’s false allegations.
“Having taken Mr. Smirnov’s bait of grand, sensational charges, the Diversion Agreement that had just been entered into and Plea Agreement that was on the verge of being finalized suddenly became inconvenient for the prosecution, and it reversed course and repudiated those Agreements,” they wrote in the filing.
The court filing demands Mr. Weiss provide more information about his handling of the case.
