Attorneys for Hunter Biden say that a photograph of sawdust misrepresented by prosecutors as cocaine shows a pattern of prosecutorial missteps.
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.
By Tom Ozimek
