As part of its “proof” that Hunter Biden lied about his cocaine use when he purchased a gun in 2018, prosecutors submitted a photo it obtained from his phone of “apparent cocaine.” In reality, the photo is almost certainly sawdust.
Also, for those who missed this picture the first (and third) times I posted it, bc it's hysterical, this is what experienced drug prosecutor Derek Hines called cocaine. pic.twitter.com/QTRCW2iUED
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 20, 2024
Furthermore, Biden’s lawyers note, the photo was sent to Biden, not taken by him.
More specifically, the discovery identifies this as a photo of a photo taken in the office of Mr. Biden’s then-psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow, which Dr. Ablow initially received from an [sic] master carpenter and later texted to Mr. Biden, stating: “This one in my office is of lines of sawdust sent to me by a master carpenter who was a coke addict.” The message accompanying that photo was meant to convey that Mr.Biden, too, could overcome any addiction. The prosecution does not provide a date for the photo, but the message from Dr. Ablow is dated November 20, 2018.
…Mistaking sawdust for cocaine sounds more like a storyline from one of the 1980s Police Academy comedies than what should be expected in a high-profile prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The legal filing goes on to note that last week's arrest of “FBI informer” Alexander Smirnov has “infected” the case. “The Special Counsel charged Mr. Smirnov with lying and obstruction, but the more interesting part of this story is not that Mr. Smirnov lied. It is more remarkable that beginning in July 2023, the Special Counsel’s team would follow Mr. Smirnov down his rabbit hole of lies as long as it did,” the attorneys wrote.
Yes, indeed. But what jumped out at us at C&L was Dr. Keith Ablow’s role in all this. How on earth did Hunter Biden become a patient of that dangerous nut job? Ablow's involvement makes my spidey senses tingle.
Long-time readers will probably recall that Ablow made a name for himself as one of Fox News’ craziest contributors, and that’s saying a lot. For example, Ablow claimed that then-President Obama’s push for gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was due to abandonment issues that led him to push for “disempowering the individual” and a belief that “the collective needs to be empowered and all the better if [Obama is] the center of the collective and the most powerful person."
Ablow also came within a hair of “diagnosing” then-Vice President Joe Biden as having dementia and suggested he may be an alcoholic, too.
We don’t know when or for how long Hunter Biden was Ablow’s patient. But we do know that Ablow left Fox in 2017. In 2019, he was accused of beating accused female patients, including beating them while having sex with them, asking them to get tattoos with his initials, and saying he wanted a master/slave relationship. His license was suspended in 2019 after a state medical board deemed him “an immediate and serious threat to the public.” He was also deemed to have improperly prescribed narcotics.
Ablow was also a devout Trumper.
On February 13, 2020, the Drug Enforcement Agency raided Ablow’s office as part of an “ongoing investigation.” Ablow was not arrested, and it’s not clear what the outcome of that raid was. But let’s not forget it was while Donald Trump was in the White House, the 2020 presidential election was in full swing and, one week earlier, the notoriously vengeful Trump had been acquitted of his first impeachment charges – for trying to blackmail Ukraine President Zelensky into digging up dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden.
Interesting timing, eh?
Our Karoli Kuns connects some dots:
