Hunter Biden’s lawyers say prosecutors confused a picture of sawdust with cocaine

Federal prosecutors mistakenly claimed in a court filing that a photo of sawdust they found while searching Hunter Biden’s electronics was cocaine, attorneys for the president’s son said Tuesday.

The sawdust picture was used in a court filing detailing incriminating information that prosecutors said they turned up while executing a search warrant of Biden’s laptop and electronics, but his legal team said in court papers that the picture was sent to their client by his then-psychiatrist as inspiration.

The picture shows three lines of yellow dust on a piece of wood near some other dust. The psychiatrist sent the picture to Biden in 2018, saying it was “lines of sawdust sent to me by a master carpenter who was a coke addict.”

Biden’s attorneys said the message and picture were “meant to convey that Mr. Biden, too, could overcome any addiction” and used the apparent mix-up to mock prosecutors.

A framed photo of what appears to be sawdust on shop table. (via special counsel David Weiss Delaware federal court filing)

“Mistaking sawdust for cocaine sounds more like a storyline from one of the 1980’s Police Academy comedies than what should be expected in a high-profile prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice,” the filing said.

Special counsel David Weiss’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Biden’s filing also references the indictment last week of Alexander Smirnov, an FBI informant who’s been charged with feeding the bureau false information about Hunter Biden and his then-presidential candidate father Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign.

“It now seems clear that the Smirnov allegations infected this case,” because the special counsel was investigating Smirnov’s allegations when their plea negotiations over gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden broke down.

“Having taken Mr. Smirnov’s bait of grand, sensational charges, the Diversion Agreement that had just been entered into and Plea Agreement that was on the verge of being finalized suddenly became inconvenient for the prosecution, and it reversed course and repudiated those Agreements,” the filing said.

Biden has since been charged by Weiss’s office with lying about his drug use when he bought a gun in Delaware in 2018 and on tax-related charges in California. He’s pleaded not guilty in both cases.

“Our motions expose the special counsel has gone to extreme lengths to bring charges against Mr. Biden that would not have been filed against anyone else,” Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a statement. “It is time to hold the special counsel accountable and dismiss these improper charges.”

The court filing Tuesday seeks more information about Weiss’s decision-making process.

“Disclosure about why the Special Counsel abandoned its June/July 2023 agreements with Mr. Biden and the role played by the Smirnov allegations may reveal flaws worse than mistaking sawdust for cocaine,” the filing said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com