Hunter Biden has previously acknowledged and detailed his years-long addiction to crack cocaine, and even though he has supposedly kicked the habit and is now clean and sober, he could still soon face legal consequences for his prior illicit drug-related activities in connection with the federal gun charges he currently faces.
On Tuesday, Special Counsel David Weiss revealed that cocaine residue had been discovered on the leather pouch Biden once used to store his allegedly illegally purchased and possessed handgun, according to Breitbart.
The president's son faces three felony charges, which could net him up to 25 years in prison, related to allegations that he knowingly lied about his otherwise admitted drug use on a federal form to purchase a small revolver in 2018 that, due to his illicit crack addition, he was barred by federal law from possessing.
USA Today reported that Hunter Biden's attorneys filed a motion in October 2023 that asked a judge to dismiss the federal gun charges pressed against him by Special Counsel Weiss, who in his previous role as the U.S. Attorney from Delaware has led a years-long and wide-ranging investigation into the president's son.
His arguments for the dismissal include claims that he did nothing wrong, that the statute prohibiting gun possession by drug addicts is unconstitutional, and that he has been unfairly targeted by "selective" and "vindictive" political prosecution brought about solely because of constant complaints from Republicans and former President Donald Trump.
Yet, all of those arguments and more were just thoroughly dismantled piece by piece by Weiss, with the added extra touch of the new revelation that directly links Biden's illegal gun possession with his illegal drug use.
In a 52-page motion of opposition filed Tuesday by the special counsel, Weiss wrote that "the strength of the evidence against him is overwhelming" and cited several examples of exceedingly descriptive admissions that Hunter Biden made about his illicit crack addiction and drug use in his 2021 memoir, as well as was obtained from search warrants for his Apple iCloud account and the contents of his now-infamous abandoned laptop.
"Furthermore, a chemist was able to confirm the presence of cocaine residue on the brown leather pouch in which defendant stored his firearm. The evidence against him does not end there," the filing continued.
"The charges in this case are not trumped up or because of former President Trump -- they are instead a result of the defendant’s own choices and were brought in spite of, not because of, any outside noise made by politicians," the special counsel noted, and later added, "Stripped of its bluster, the defendant’s theory of vindictiveness is simply not credible."
The filing from Special Counsel Weiss went on to lay out the factual background of the federal gun charges, including how Biden made knowingly false statements about his drug use on the ATF Form 4473, which is required for a gun purchase from a federally licensed dealer, and how the dealer would have denied that purchase if Biden had been truthful about his illicit drug use on the federal form.
Weiss further detailed how that handgun Biden purchased under false pretenses in 2018 came to be in the possession of law enforcement in Delaware less than two weeks later after his then-girlfriend -- Hallie Biden, the widow of his late brother Beau -- had thrown away the firearm and the leather pouch in which it was stored, in a trash can after finding it in his unlocked vehicle.
As for that leather pouch taken into custody by police in 2018, the special counsel revealed, "In 2023, FBI investigators pulled sealed evidence from the state police vault to take photographs of the defendant’s firearm. After opening the evidence, FBI investigators observed a white powdery substance on the defendant’s brown leather pouch that had held the defendant’s firearm in October 2018."
"Based on their training and experience, investigators believed that this substance was likely cocaine and that this evidence would corroborate the messages that investigators had obtained which showed the defendant buying and using drugs in October 2018," he continued. "An FBI chemist subsequently analyzed the residue and determined that it was cocaine."
Weiss added in what some might view as a legal slam dunk, "To be clear, investigators literally found drugs on the pouch where the defendant had kept his gun."
