Hunter Biden’s legal team has adopted an “everything but the kitchen sink” strategy to defend the president’s son from charges that he purchased and possessed a firearm in violation of federal law by lying about his drug use when he purchased a pistol in Delaware in 2018. Attorney Abbe Lowell has previously stated that one of Biden’s defenses will be to argue that the law he’s charged with violating is itself a violation of the right to keep and bear arms, but in his latest court filing Lowell also aims some of the evidence recently brought forward by prosecutor David Weiss.
Lowell made his fresh demand for evidence because prosecutors had said in July they already provided all the evidence in the case before the plea bargain, yet more continues to turn up.
Among the evidence was a picture Hunter Biden allegedly took that prosecutors described as showing strips of cocaine. But Lowell said Biden didn’t take the picture and the alleged cocaine was in fact sawdust.
“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,” Lowell wrote.
In a related vein, Lowell criticized the prosecution’s revelation in a recent court filing that a brown leather pouch Biden used to hold his gun was found with cocaine residue.
Lowell said the prosecution filing neglected to say that the pouch was found in a trash cash by a scavenger in October 2018 – and authorities then waited a “dumbfounding” five years to test it for drug residue.
“The prosecution offers no explanation for that either,” Lowell said.
If Lowell’s allegations are correct, then that would be an embarrassment for Weiss and his team of federal prosecutors, but it’s not like that’s the only bit of evidence that Weiss has brought forward. The most damning part of the case against Hunter Biden is that he himself has admitted to regularly abusing drugs, including crack cocaine, at the very time he purchased the revolver in 2018. In fact, as Weiss has pointed out, Biden has said that the motivation for buying the gun was having a firearm pointed at him by one of his drug dealers.
Even if U.S. Attorneys mistook sawdust for cocaine, or police failed to test the pouch that held the pistol for drug residue until years after it was discovered, Biden’s written admissions from his 2021 memoir are damning to his defense. Lowell has also contended that the charges never would have been brought if Hunter Biden wasn’t the president’s son, but that argument fails to pass muster given that there are other cases involving a top-level charge of possessing a gun by an unlawful user of drugs that are winding their way through the court system. In fact, the DOJ has asked the Supreme Court to grant cert in a case called U.S. v. Daniels after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a 46-month prison sentence for Darnell Daniels, ruling that the law forbidding him from possessing a firearm while he was a regular user of marijuana violated his Second Amendment rights.
Adopting the Fifth Circuit’s arguments is still Biden’s best defense to the gun charges he’s currently facing. Even if the judge overseeing the case were to quash the evidence that Lowell’s complained about, his client’s own statements could very well be enough for a conviction, and I don’t see the judge disallowing Biden’s own memoir to be introduced into evidence. If we’re to believe what Biden wrote, then it’s clear that he bought a gun while he was regularly abusing drugs. Lowell’s allegations about a politically motivated prosecution aren’t going to save his client, and neither will his complaints about some of Weiss’s evidence. Unless he’s angling for a plea deal that will keep Hunter out of prison, Lowell should stick to the argument that 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(3) violated his client’s right to keep and bear arms, even if that puts Hunter Biden at odds with his dad’s zealous anti-Second Amendment agenda.
