Hunter Biden’s lawyers claim special counsel David Weiss acting on ‘Russian intelligence’

Attorneys for Hunter Biden insinuated Monday that special counsel David Weiss was doing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding by trying to prosecute the 54-year-old first son.

Attorneys Abbe Lowell and Bartholomew Dalton blasted Weiss for slapping tax and gun-related charges on the younger Biden after his plea deal imploded last July and argued his actions advanced the Kremlin’s interests.

“The Special Counsel has done exactly what the Russian intelligence operation desired by initiating prosecutions against Mr. Biden,” the attorneys wrote in a scathing six-page filing Monday.

The filling was a supplemental in Lowell’s motion to get the case against Biden tossed out in the wake of Weiss’ indictment against former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov last month.

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Smirnov was the source of now-seemingly dubious allegations that Joe and Hunter Biden received $5 million apiece from Burisma Holdings owner Mykola Zlochevsky in exchange for helping to oust Ukraine’s former Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin.

Hunter Biden’s attorneys alleged that Weiss’ team “reopened” its review of Smirnov’s claims sometime last year in response to pressure from “extremist Republicans and right-wing press outlets” as they voiced outrage over the dubious bribery accusations.

From there, Lowell and Dalton seemingly drew a connection to the implosion of a planned plea agreement on the tax charges last July and the subsequent collapse of the pretrial diversion agreement for the firearm charges.

“By the end of that month (July), the then-U.S. Attorney’s Office, instead of addressing with Mr. Biden’s counsel the specific questions this Court asked on July 26, instead abruptly backed away from a Plea Agreement that it signed and proposed to this Court and reneged on the Diversion Agreement,” they wrote.

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However, US District Judge Maryellen Noreika ripped into the deal during the dramatic July 26, 2023 hearing, and exposed daylight between the prosecutors and defense over whether or not he would enjoy blanket immunity.

Days before that hearing last July, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released an FD-1023 form detailing Smirnov’s claims to the FBI.

Multiple Republican lawmakers such as Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky), who is helming the impeachment probe into the president, publicly talked about that file.

Smirnov, a dual US-Israeli citizen, is now facing two felony counts for making a false statement to the FBI as well as creating a false and fictitious record. He has pleaded not guilty.

After Weiss’ indictment against Smirnov last month, Lowell demanded the tax charges against the first son get dismissed.

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In the supplemental filing Monday, Lowell and Dalton harped on Smirnov’s alleged ties to Russian intelligence.

Prosecutors alleged that Smirnov peddled a provably false story — believed to have come from Russian intelligence — that the Premier Palace hotel in Kyiv had recordings of damaging statements from Hunter Biden.

This was easily debunked because Hunter “has never traveled to Ukraine,” according to prosecutors. 

“The Special Counsel tells us Russian intelligence sought to influence the U.S. presidential election by using allegations against Hunter Biden to hurt President Biden’s reelection,” Lowell and Dalton underscored.

Hunter Biden’s attorneys further chided that Weiss’ team was either “knowingly or blind to the fact that they were carrying out the plan of Russian intelligence.”

Weiss’ team previously blistered Lowell’s assertions that his office was mounting a “selective and vindictive” as “conspiratorial” and “nothing more than a house of cards.”

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“The defendant concocts a conspiracy theory that the prosecution has ‘upped the ante’ to appease politicians who have absolutely nothing to do with the prosecution and are not even members of the current Executive Branch,” prosecutors wrote in a filing last Friday.

Hunter Biden is facing nine tax-related charges and three charges related to illegal possession of a firearm while addicted to illicit drugs. He has pleaded not guilty.

Allegations that Russia is the puppetmaster behind some of Hunter Biden’s troubles are nothing new.

In October 2020, 51 former intelligence officials signed a letter claiming that his laptop hard drive, first reported by The Post in a bombshell story days earlier, “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Since then, numerous other outlets such as CBS have corroborated large swaths of the hard drive. IRS whistleblowers claimed last year that the FBI even verified the authenticity of the abandoned laptop.

Late last month, Hunter Biden delivered testimony before the House Republican impeachment probe.

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He was coy about the authenticity of the abandoned laptop and testified that there were reports on elements of his laptop that were either “fabricated, hacked, stolen, or manipulated 100 percent.” He only gave one example of “fabricated” reports of him meeting with a “Secret Service agent in a hotel room in Los Angeles.”

At the same time, during his hearing, Hunter Biden seemingly confirmed and expanded on many revelations that stemmed from his laptop.

For example, he confirmed that his father was “the big guy” referenced in an email about a business deal with a Chinese state-linked energy company.

Hunter Biden also rejected any notion that his father benefited from that deal with CEFC China Energy as the message appeared to imply could be the case.

Additionally, last year, his legal team filed a suit against repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, claiming he “unlawfully” the laptop data, which paved the way for “hundreds of gigabytes of Mr. Biden’s personal data, without any discretion, to be circulated around the Internet.”

The Post reached out to the Justice Department for comment.