Hunter Biden Prosecutor Derek Hines and the February 2019 Super 8 Crack Pipe
I have written three posts already where I have caught Derek Hines making the same false claim about his favorite passage of Hunter Biden’s memoir, in which the President’s son describes, “It was me and a crack pipe in a Super 8.”
In March, when I realized that in January, Hines claimed a passage representing Hunter Biden’s addiction in February 2019 after Keith Ablow made it worse was actually what his addiction was like in October 2018, I just assumed it was one of the routine fuck-ups I was beginning to expect from Derek Hines (who was also arguing that what distinguishes Hunter Biden from Roger Stone is that Trump’s rat-fucker didn’t write the memoir that he actually did write that was even more closely related to his alleged tax evasion).
Here’s how Weiss treats Hunter’s memoir in the equivalent filing in the gun crimes case.
After the defendant publicly announced his awareness of a federal investigation of him in late 2020, see ECF 63 at 5, the following year (2021) he chose to author, sell and promote his memoir, Beautiful Things, and to release an audiobook in a lucrative book deal. Relevant to the charges in this matter, the defendant made expansive admissions about his extensive and persistent drug use, including throughout the year 2018 when he purchased the gun. For example, the defendant admitted that he was experiencing “full blown addiction” to crack cocaine and by the fall of 2018 he had gotten to the point that:
It was me and a crack pipe in a Super 8, not knowing which the fuck way was up. All my energy revolved around smoking drugs and making arrangements to buy drugs—feeding the beast. To facilitate it, I resurrected the same sleep schedule I’d kept in L.A.: never. There was hardly any mistaking me now for a so-called respectable citizen. Crack is a great leveler.
Hunter Biden, Beautiful Things (2021) at 203, 208
In the Delaware case, Weiss is arguing something different than he is in the LA case, that is about how much evidence (Weiss claims) there is to prove the gun case. As I noted, that’s actually counterproductive in the selective prosecution response, because it proves that the evidence Weiss claims to think is so damning was available in 2021, before he decided to divert the gun crime in 2023, before he came to fear for the safety of his family and then reneged on that diversion agreement.
Oh. And also? Weiss again botches the evidence. The passage cited above about a crack pipe in a Super 8 on page 208 describes the aftermath, in February 2019, of the Ketamine treatment Hunter got from Roger Stone buddy Keith Ablow that — Hunter’s memoir describes — made things worse.
The therapy’s results were disastrous. I was in no way ready to process the feelings it unloosed or prompted by reliving past physical and emotional traumas. So I backslid. I did exactly what I’d come to Massachusetts to stop doing. I’d stay clean for a week, break away from the center to meet a connection I found in Rhode Island, smoke up, then return.
[snip]
Finally, the therapist in Newburyport said there was little point in our continuing.
“Hunter,” he told me, with all the exasperated, empathetic sincerity he could muster, “this is not working.”
I headed back toward Delaware, in no shape to face anyone or anything. To ensure that I wouldn’t have to do either, I took an exit at New Haven. For the next three or four weeks, I lived in a series of low-budget, low-expectations motels up and down Interstate 95, between New Haven and Bridgeport.
I exchanged L.A.’s $400-a-night bungalows and their endless parade of blingy degenerates for the underbelly of Connecticut’s $59-a-night motel rooms and the dealers, hookers, and hard-core addicts—like me—who favored them. I no longer had one foot in polite society and one foot out. I avoided polite society altogether. I hardly went anywhere now, except to buy. It was me and a crack pipe in a Super 8, not knowing which the fuck way was up. [my emphasis]
This is in no way a description of the state of Hunter’s addiction in “fall of 2018,” when he bought a gun. It’s a description of the state of Hunter’s addiction in February 2019, after treatment from Ablow exacerbated the addiction. To make things worse, Hunter gets the timing of the 2019 follow-up treatment wrong in the book, saying it happened in February when it started in January. This passage is utterly worthless to prove the gun crime, and instead helps to prove that memoirs, especially those written by recovering addicts, are prone to narrative embellishment and error.
When he excluded the passage of the memoir about returning home in October 2018, and instead included the passage describing returning home after Keith Ablow made his addiction worse as if it was the state of his addiction in October 2018, I began to consider outright deceit.
The selections are not surprising. But in two ways, they are grotesquely dishonest. First, the chosen excerpts misleadingly lead from something that happened in August 2018.
To something that happened in February 2019.
Presented in the way it is, jurors will be wildly misled that Hunter’s New Haven exploits are what happened immediately after he relapsed in August 2018. They will be misled into believing the description of the New Haven depravity represent Hunter’s state in October 2018. They don’t.
Shortly after I wrote the post, he belatedly remembered the passage describing him returning home in October 2018 and added it to the exhibit.
You’re welcome, Mr. Hines.
But then he misrepresented this timeline again in his trial brief, as I described here.
And they keep massaging this timeline. In their latest iteration in the trial brief, prosecutors try to minimize how long Hunter was in Ablow’s treatment (which, in any case, is inaccurate in Hunter’s book).
In his book, the defendant describes that he had a short stint at a therapistrun wellness center in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where the defendant says he sought drug addiction therapy.
By “brief,” these prosecutors mean Hunter claimed he spent 8 weeks in Newburyport, but the available evidence shows his follow-up trip started in mid-January, weeks earlier than he claimed in the book.
I would make two trips up there, staying for about six weeks on the first visit, returning to Maryland, then heading back for a couple weeks of follow-up in February of the new year.
As noted here, prosecutors are trying to edit the memoir to say what they want it to say, cherry picking pages and presenting them out of context. After I noted that they had excluded the part that shows Hunter arriving back in Delaware, they’ve added it belatedly in their trial brief.
7 Page 203 was inadvertently omitted from the government’s excerpts at Doc. No. 119-1. The government includes this single page in Exhibit 1 to this filing (it is the only page added to the submission at 119-1).
It’s beginning to look like a pattern!!
It is a pattern.
He did the same again today, pretending something that is clearly 2019 happened in 2018.
Q. And how about any section in Chapter 9 or Chapter 10, the relevant time period for 2018?
A. No.
Q. And finally, page 208, continuing in the same chapter, after Mr. Biden describes full blown addiction, Exhibit 19, page 208, does Mr. Biden write “crack is a great leveler.” And then he goes on to say “just like in California.” Is that what he goes on to say here?
A. Yes.
Q. If you zoom out, above that, does he say in the first paragraph, “It was me and a crack pipe and a super eight, not knowing which the fuck way was up.” Are those his words?
A. Yes.
Q. And this is in the same chapter when he describes his return in the fall of 2018; correct?
At this point, this has to just willful deceit, permissible prosecutorial dickishness edging over into something else.
Hines has had to fix this error before, and he’s still pretending that when Hunter Biden said, “I headed back toward Delaware, in no shape to face anyone or anything,” describing his state after Keith Ablow made his addiction worse in 2019, instead described what he was like in 2018.
What kind of man keeps going back to metaphorically suck on the same crack pipe he found in a place it doesn’t really belong, Derek Hines, in New Haven in February 2019 rather than in Wilmington in October 2018 where he badly wants it to be? What kind of man keeps doing that?
Short answer, it is someone who is not interested in the truth but instead is pursuing the agenda of his masters. We’ll see what Lowell does with this gaslighting on cross, I’m sure he’s still allowed to ask specific timeline questions like when the referenced events actually occurred.
Pretty clearly a man who is desperate for a conviction in a case he knows he should not have brought. It’s either let the jury decide and blame them for an acquittal if it happens or admit he is wrong and should never have brought this case.
Trump, Leonard Leo and Don McGahn have done a massive amount of damage to the Federal Court System by using their money and political power to corrupt Justices Alito and Thomas, get Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett nominated by Trump and approved by the Senate to become Associate Justices, and get the likes of Maryellen Noreika nominated and approved to be a Federal Jurist.
Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Noreika were sponsored by Trump, Leo and McGahn for their political beliefs, not their legal acumen and it shows in this Hunter Biden trial overseen by Judge Noreika.
Trump, Leo and McGahn’s work will take generations to undo.
It was the sainted GHW Bush who appointed Thomas and GW Bush who appointed Alito and Roberts. Those two “normal” Republicans (a label the WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin used this week to describe Dubya) appointed the three most dangerous extreme justices. Alito and Thomas are blatant Christian nationalists and leads the pro-plutocracy and anti-voting rights contingent.
Damn Dr. Wheeler, Derek Hines has to be feeling that burn all the way from across the Atlantic.
Can’t unsee that image, forget Hunter Biden’s.
Won’t the President commute his son’s sentence to be consistent with the original plea bargain agreement if the jury convicts Hunter Biden?
Not until after the election. It would be political suicide to do it before the election given the media’s unwillingness to make it clear this is a political prosecution.
I was not happy to see that Will Lewis, the Murdoch-world guy now in charge of the WaPo says a top priority will be focusing on the Hunter Biden trials. Having helped destroy the UK’s Tory Party he must think MAGA world will be a better place for him to operate.
It’s a man doing his job. One does not prosper by being over burdened with ethical considerations. Hell, Hunter is guilty enough to be guilty of one of the sketchy charges anyway so no biggie. The fate of Hunter Biden is so minuscule compared to what so many are going to face in the years to come, in courts alone, the only reason to note what is going down here is to get a depressing preview.
The old GOP whine about criminalizing politics served to do the obverse, with intent. That was to decriminalize politics. Now they are being coflated so using the law will be substantiated as legitimate political activity. Along with prosecutors and police becoming open political actors, like say, Texas. I’m trying to imagine an institution that will counter this. Why or how would it if voters don’t?
What kind of man? A man who thinks addicts snort sawdust.
A man who wants the public to believe a defendant is guilty by inference, instead of through admissible evidence, because his case is weak and to do his masters’ bidding. The amount of public resources these cases, which could long ago have been fairly settled, are consuming must be staggering.
Reminds me of a few passages from the KUBARK manual, reciting the ways the CIA used to cause disaffection among a leader’s base. Illicit sex and drug use were always among the top choices. Better and easie if there was a grain of truth to them, as with Eliot Spitzer and HB. The process and punishment opposition politicians are demanding here seems entirely political.
This trial is giving me flashbacks to my own civil case which I filed when city administrators reneged on an agreement they made with me and branch staff. They did it behind my back but in front of my staff while I was in a local one-day training session.
When I pointed out that they broke the agreement and reminded them that we had rights, I was demoted. Then they started making stuff up to justify their wrongdoing. For example, they repeatedly said that the militia members’ rifle bag was a flag bag. They repeatedly said I did something with my hand that would have required my arm to be 12 feet long.
They did many other things, as well, including what staff members believed was intimidation and witness tampering, not to mention perjury. The people involved in this behavior were not only from the library, but also from the General Counsel’s office and the Mayor’s office.
So, I am not surprised by what Derek Hines is doing. But it sickens me. It’s disgusting. As I’ve mentioned before, I believe that kind of behavior is what caused the tumor on my adrenal gland. I really don’t understand why this behavior is allowed. It seems like public corruption to me.
I quite sympathize with being a victim of what I call the “maw”. What is worse here, is not only the institutional bias towards oppression, but the very real evidence that the institution is being used by political actors for their own purposes as well. It’s very Orwellian (or like The Matrix), and feels like a tragedy for our social contract and what we thought was “the American way”.
Isn’t sawdust a Schedule 1 drug?
OT: in classified docs case, Judge Cannon issued an order that says, among other topics, she’ll hear oral arguments on Special Counsel’s Motion for Modification of Conditions of Release on June 24 at 3pm. (SCO’s reply to Trump, if any, was due June 21).
That’s not the worst of it, she also invites input from several wingnut amicis as well for the hearing. Yikes.
It’s hard to overstate how rare it is to admit amicus briefs at the trial court level. It’s a needle in several haystacks odds for a court to allow authors of an amicus brief to argue the case in court.
Cannon is hiding beyond procedure, delaying decisions and other work, inexperience and incompetence, to avoid being overturned. The more likely explanation is that she’s working hard to craft and achieve these outcomes, principally delay, but with more to come.
This post is a good example of why I read emptywheel every day. Marcy is so smart and so meticulous in her attention to detail and data handling and retention, federal prosecutors rely on her edits to keep their briefs coherent! Hunter Biden, like Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford), have had so many extremely personal details about their lives exposed because of their affiliation, wanted or not, with Donald John Trump. I feel real human empathy and sympathy for their life experiences and how they have been forever tainted by this vile man. Astonishing.
The DOJ is supposed to be the seeker of truth and the paragon of justice. If the jury believes that a prosecutor is deliberately misleading them by lying it vitiates their whole purpose. The irony here is, that if Biden is acquitted based on misrepresentations, the diversion agreement is moot and Biden can obtain a gun legally through the gun show loophole.
Ms Wheeler’s point about the Baltimore USA crew is worth repeating. Usually an able, clever boss both selects and forms the views and acts of his underlings, intentionally, because it extends his power and control. Here we see the Federalist rot runs both deep and wide, becoming a virtual, if not actual, cabal. These aren’t disinterested actors, mere servants of truth, Justice, and the American Way. They are all acting towards a common cause and end.