Attorneys for Hunter Biden claimed on Tuesday that federal prosecutors had mistakenly identified cocaine in a sawdust photo they had discovered while searching Hunter’s electronics.
Biden's legal team claimed in court papers that the sawdust image was sent to their client as inspiration by his then-psychiatrist, though prosecutors used the photo in a court filing explaining incriminating information found while executing a search warrant of Biden’s electronics.
On a piece of wood, the image depicts three lines of yellow dust. In 2018, the psychiatrist sent the image to Biden under the caption “lines of sawdust sent to me by a master carpenter who was a coke addict.”
The message and image were “meant to convey that Mr. Biden, too, could overcome any addiction,” his attorneys claimed, and mocked the prosecution for their apparent confusion.
According to the filing, 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.”
A request for comment was not immediately answered by the office of special counsel David Weiss.
The indictment of FBI informant Alexander Smirnov last week, who is accused of providing the bureau with false information about Hunter Biden and his then-presidential candidate father Joe during the 2020 presidential campaign, is also cited in Bden's filing.
Because the special counsel was looking into Smirnov's allegations at the time of their failed plea negotiations regarding gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden, it now appears obvious that the allegations infected this case.
The filing stated that the prosecution reversed course and repudiated those Agreements after taking Mr. Smirnov's bait of grand, sensational charges. The Diversion Agreement and Plea Agreement that had just been entered into and were about to be finalized, respectively, became inconvenient.
Since then, Weiss’ office has accused Biden of lying about using drugs when he purchased a gun in Delaware in 2018 and of violating Californian tax laws. In both instances, he entered not guilty pleas.
According to a statement from Hunter Biden's attorney Abbe Lowell, “Our motions expose the special counsel has gone to great lengths to bring charges against him that would not have been filed against anyone else.” He stated the special counsel needs to be held accountable and these unjustified accusations should be dropped.
More details about Weiss's decision-making process were sought in the court filing.
The filing claimed that disclosure about the Special Counsel's decision to renounce its June/July 2023 agreements with Mr. Biden and the role played by the Smirnov allegations “may reveal flaws worse than mistaking sawdust for cocaine.”
