Hunter Biden attorneys say ‘reckless’ prosecutors mistook ‘lines of sawdust’ for cocaine in evidence dump
Hunter Biden’s attorneys say federal prosecutors have been “gun-shy” about sharing evidence ahead of the first son’s weapons trial — and embarrassingly released a photo of purported cocaine that is actually sawdust in a carpenter’s shop.
Attorneys Abbe Lowell and Bartholomew Dalton accused special counsel David Weiss of not providing their client with “all the information that he is due so that he can prepare for and receive a fair trial,” according to the Tuesday filing in Delaware federal court.
“The prosecution’s latest filing amplifies why Mr. Biden and the Court cannot take the prosecution’s assertions … at face value,” they added, calling a Feb. 13 submission from Weiss’ office “flat-out wrong” for alleging Hunter “took multiple photographs” of “apparent cocaine, crack cocaine, and drug paraphernalia.”
“Multiple sources have pointed out, and a review of discovery confirms, this is actually a photo of sawdust from an expert carpenter and it was sent to Mr. Biden, not vice versa,” Lowell and Dalton wrote.
According to the attorneys, Hunter’s former psychiatrist, Dr. Keith Ablow, had taken the photo to show his patient “lines of sawdust sent to me by a master carpenter who was a coke addict” in an effort “to convey that Mr. Biden, too, could overcome any addiction.”
The photo in question was one of four included in the earlier filing by Weiss that featured cocaine and drug paraphernalia. Hunter’s attorneys did not mention the other images in the Tuesday filing.
“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,” Lowell and Dalton 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.”
The attorneys also took issue with prosecutors disclosing evidence of cocaine residue on a gun holster belonging to Hunter Biden and citing analysis conducted last year by an FBI chemist.
“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 residue and never chose to retrieve fingerprints from it,” they said.
In an earlier filing, Weiss said his office had shared more than 1 million pages of documents across two federal indictments of Hunter Biden, 54, for making false statements on a federal gun-purchasing form and evading $1.4 million in tax payments.
The special counsel also accused Hunter’s defense team of having “misrepresented” or not fully reviewed the evidence it has already received.
Lowell and Dalton admitted in Tuesday’s filing that “mixed media data in this tech age is difficult to navigate” and “text messages and photos cited by the prosecution in its motions, for example, are difficult to locate.”
A January filing from Weiss stated that “investigators literally found drugs on the pouch where the defendant had kept his gun” and the first son’s own 2021 memoir “Beautiful Things” had “made countless incriminating statements about his years-long drug usage.”
Hunter lied about his cocaine dependency when purchasing the Colt Cobra 38SPL revolver from a Delaware gun shop in October 2018, according to the initial indictment, but his sister-in-law-turned-lover Hallie Biden tossed it 11 days later into a trash can behind a grocery store.
FBI agents eventually recovered the firearm from a Delaware state police vault and took photos of it in 2023, when they discovered the white powder on its leather pouch holster.
Lowell and Dalton said in their filing that “who handled the pouch, where it was found, and the chain of custody in the days leading up to” its disposal on Oct. 12, 2018 “will all be critical issues at any trial and require advance preparation.”
Last July, the first son stated in a Wilmington, Del., federal courtroom that he had been clean since June 2019, but his defense team rejected a plea agreement on the gun charges over concerns that it would not provide their client broad immunity from other charges.
Those may have included potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which Lowell and Dalton allege in their Tuesday filing were premised on the testimony of a confidential FBI informant who has since been indicted for allegedly lying to the bureau about the president and his son.
“[T]he role played by the [informant’s] allegations may reveal flaws worse than mistaking sawdust for cocaine,” they wrote, adding that Weiss’ office had “gotten much wrong” about the case, which “provides good cause for Mr. Biden to question whether it has gotten its discovery obligations right.”
The attorneys have also asked whether grand jury proceedings may have been flawed or biased and demanded further information from the Department of Justice about Trump administration officials who opened the case into Hunter.
