Special counsel David Weiss, who is leading the prosecution against Hunter Biden in Delaware, shared in a court filing this week photos and messages to support the government’s allegation that the first son was a drug user when he purchased a gun in 2018.
The filing contained messages and photos from what prosecutors said was Biden’s computer backup data, the authenticity of which the first son has yet to acknowledge after years of his laptop contents making headlines.
Prosecutors filed the court documents Tuesday in response to challenges from Biden about the format of the discovery Weiss had provided to him. Biden’s defense attorneys had argued Weiss had given them an “abyss of data” that was not easily searchable.
“Mr. Biden is simply requesting that the prosecution generally point defense counsel to
where on the image it can find the quoted text messages and referenced photos described in the
prosecution’s latest briefs, so as to avoid “present[ing] the defense with a needle-in-a-haystack”
obstacle,” the defense attorneys wrote.
Prosecutors acquiesced, replying with images of text messages Biden wrote where he said he had just smoked crack on Oct. 14, 2018, two days after he allegedly lied on a federal gun form about his drug use to purchase a revolver.
The prosecutors also included photos from 2018 of what they said appeared to be drugs and drug paraphernalia, which they found among his computer data.
The messages and photos had previously been made public by Garrett Ziegler, whom Biden is now suing over allegations that Ziegler hacked his data and manipulated it. Weiss also referenced the messages and photos in previous filings, but this is the first time he has provided visuals of them in court.
Ziegler took to X to highlight that he had already published the items and also identified what he claimed was an apparent mistake in the prosecutors’ filing, a photo that, according to Ziegler, was of sawdust rather than illicit drugs.
Unsurprisingly, @USAttyWeiss‘s subordinates made at least one mistake. Time will tell how important the mistake will be.
On page 9 of 10 in Exhibit 1, Wise & Hines submitted a photograph of three lines of a substance, stating that Hunter took the photograph in question &… pic.twitter.com/A1Lgv5tmUV
— Marco Polo (@MarcoPolo501c3) February 14, 2024
Biden’s defense attorneys asked Judge Maryellen Noreika on Wednesday if they could file a reply to Weiss within the next week, noting prosecutors told Biden’s team they had no objections to that.
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Weiss charged Biden with three felonies in Delaware in September over the alleged illegal gun purchase. Less than two months later, he also charged Biden in California with several tax violations.
The first son has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges. He has also asked to have the charges in Delaware dropped, and the judge in the case is in the process of weighing his request.