President Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been charged with lying about his drug abuse on an application to buy a handgun. He pleaded not guilty, and he’s moved to dismiss the charge, described by his lawyers as “selective.”
Then on Tuesday, prosecutors said that Hunter Biden was following a path leading to a dead end. They revealed that Hunter Biden had been using a gun holster with cocaine residue on it.
“The strength of the evidence against him is overwhelming,” prosecutors told a judge Tuesday.
“To be clear, investigators literally found drugs on the pouch where the defendant had kept his gun.”
Prosecutors said that investigators had found a white powdery substance on the brown leather pouch he used to store the gun after pulling it from the state police vault last year, prosecutors wrote. They said an FBI chemist identified the substance as cocaine.
The prosecution also cited Hunter Biden’s own “incriminating statements” from his 2021 memoir.
Hunter Biden kept a gun for about 11 days in 2018, and he has acknowledged his abuse of crack cocaine during that period. He denies breaking the law, but the defense has remained quiet on the prosecutors’ new revelations.
These criminal proceedings could have been avoided with a plea deal last year. He had initially agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges and would have also avoided prosecution on the gun charges had he’d taken two years’ probation. It was the culmination of a yearslong investigation by federal prosecutors into the business dealings of the president’s son.
However, the plea agreement crumbled after some softball questions by a judge.
Hunter Biden was indicted afterward, and he pleaded not guilty… despite the “overwhelming” evidence.
Now, his lawyers are urging the judge to dismiss the gun case, alleging he was “selectively charged” for improper political purposes.
They have argued that special counsel David Weiss — who also serves as U.S. attorney for Delaware and was originally appointed by former President Donald Trump — “buckled under political pressure” to bring more severe charges amid criticism of the deal from Trump and other Republicans.
Prosecutors, however, said there is no evidence “to support his allegation that the Executive Branch, led by his father, President Biden, and its Justice Department, led by the Attorney General appointed by his father, authorized prosecution by the U.S. Attorney and Special Counsel of their choosing for an ‘improper political purpose.’”
“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,” prosecutors wrote.
President Biden says that he didn’t know about his son’s lie on his application to buy a handgun.
““This thing about a gun – I didn’t know anything about it. But turns out that… he made an application to purchase a gun,” President Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper in 2022.
“You get asked a question. ‘Are you on drugs, or do use drugs?’ He said no. And he wrote about saying no in his book.”
Take a look —
WATCH: Joe Biden drops his cheat sheet during his interview with CNN's Jake Tapper. pic.twitter.com/XDHKrSpjBA
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 12, 2022
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.