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?