Hunter Biden faces prison time — 15 to 21 months — if he is convicted on the gun charges he faces, prosecutors have told a federal judge.
In a series of filings in the case, special counsel David Weiss answered Mr. Biden’s claims that he has been unfairly targeted for crimes because of his famous last name.
Mr. Weiss and Derek E. Hines, the senior assistant special counsel, told a judge this week that Mr. Biden’s case is worse than other defendants who have been charged with lying on gun background checks and possessing a firearm despite being a prohibited person.
They said Mr. Biden was a self-destructive cocaine user. Cocaine is more dangerous than marijuana, which accounts for many of the cases of illegal drug use while owning a gun.
They characterized Mr. Biden as reckless. He essentially begged to be prosecuted by bragging in his 2021 memoir about his drug-saturated life at the time he bought and owned the Colt revolver, they said.
Mr. Hines revealed that the pouch Mr. Biden used to store his firearm had a dusting of white powder that tested positive for cocaine.
“To be clear, investigators literally found drugs on the pouch where the defendant had kept his gun,” Mr. Hines wrote.
Mr. Biden has been indicted on two charges of making a false statement related to the purchase of the gun and one charge of possessing the gun while being an unlawful drug user.
Two of those charges carry maximum sentences of 10 years, and the other carries a maximum of five years. Mr. Biden is unlikely to get anywhere near that much time if convicted.
Mr. Hines said the government “preliminarily estimates that the defendant’s post-trial guidelines as determined under the United States Sentencing Guidelines are 15-21 months’ imprisonment.”
Those guidelines aren’t binding on judges but give a sense of the jeopardy for Mr. Biden, who has downplayed the seriousness of the case.
The Washington Times has reached out to Mr. Biden’s attorney for comment on that calculation.
The revelations were part of a series of responses to Mr. Biden’s legal team, which last month filed motions asking a judge to dismiss the three gun charges against the president’s son. Among their reasons were that Mr. Weiss was allegedly improperly serving as special counsel, that the gun charges are unconstitutional, that Hunter Biden is the subject of vindictive prosecution, and that he is immune from prosecution because he agreed to a diversion agreement last year.
Mr. Biden, through his attorneys, said Mr. Weiss agreed to settle the gun charges with no prison time but changed his mind after former President Donald Trump and other conservatives complained.
“This is perhaps the clearest of cases of prosecutors making prosecutorial decisions for political reasons, selectively and vindictively prosecuting Mr. Biden based on his familial and political affiliation with his father, the president of the United States,” defense attorney Abbe Lowell wrote.
He said no other “similarly situated person” would have been charged given the facts of Mr. Biden’s case. Mr. Biden bought “a small firearm that he owned for a mere 11 days, never loaded and never fired,” he said, and Mr. Weiss “traded his own judgment for the judgment of President Biden’s political enemies.”
Mr. Hines said that was a poor recounting. He said the president’s son used crack cocaine and his pursuit of the gun was more nefarious than the defense suggested.
He said Mr. Biden lied to purchase the weapon, he bought a speed loader, “an accessory that enhanced the ability to use it in a shootout,” and he wrote a “lucrative” memoir in which he had the audacity to brag about his drug use, giving authorities even more evidence against him.
“The defendant’s choice to sell a book containing these admissions not only made the government’s case against him stronger, but also increased a potential prosecution’s general deterrence value,” Mr. Hines wrote.
As for potential sentencing, he said Mr. Biden’s criminal history is the lowest, category I. The offense level would be 14 — a calculation of the seriousness of the crime. Fraud has a base offense level of 7, and robbery has a base level of 20. If a gun is brandished, it can mean a 5-point increase, and if a gun is fired, it could tack on 2 more points, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
The revelation of the cocaine residue on the pouch raises other questions about the treatment of Mr. Biden’s case.
Prosecutors said Delaware State Police had been holding the pouch in evidence since Hallie Biden, the then-girlfriend of Hunter Biden and wife of his late brother, tossed the pouch, gun, 23 rounds of ammunition and the speed loader into a trash can at a grocery store in Wilmington in 2018.
State police never pursued any charges and kept the materials in a vault. It wasn’t until last year, when the FBI asked to take photos of the gun, that federal investigators saw the powder and figured it was cocaine. An FBI chemical test confirmed it was cocaine.
The court filing did not say why Delaware authorities didn’t spot and test the pouch during the five years they possessed the materials.
Delaware State Police referred an inquiry about its handling of the pouch to the special counsel’s office.
The latest prosecution filings also shed new light on Mr. Biden’s laptop, which has long been the source of speculation and misinformation.
In the days before the 2020 presidential election, the Biden campaign prodded senior former national security officials to denounce reporting by The New York Post on the laptop’s contents as Russian disinformation.
The FBI and IRS criminal investigators pursuing a tax investigation obtained the laptop’s contents via search warrant in 2019 and found it authentic. They obtained a warrant to look at the contents of Mr. Biden’s Apple iCloud account. Prosecutors said the information was “largely duplicative” of the laptop.
It wasn’t until last year that agents obtained a warrant to pore over the contents for evidence of the gun crimes.
They recovered photos and messages that they said were clear evidence of Mr. Biden’s drug use at the time he bought and possessed the Colt revolver in October 2018.
In a message to Hallie Biden the day after he bought the gun, Mr. Biden told her he was waiting behind a minor league baseball stadium for Mookie, his drug dealer. The next day, he told his girlfriend via text that he was “sleeping on a car smoking crack.”
After Hallie Biden grabbed the gun from his vehicle and dumped it, he fired off enraged texts. She replied: “I just want you safe. That was not safe. … You have lost your mind hunter. I’m sorry I handled it poorly today but you are in huge denial about yourself and about that reality that I just want you safe.”
In November 2018, after authorities had the weapon, Mr. Biden continued to text about his cocaine issues. One message said, “I’m a [expletive] better man than any man you know whether I’m smoking crack or not.” That December, he said, “I’ll [expletive] get sober when I want to get [expletive] sober.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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