Hunter Biden faces real prison time — between 15 and 21 months — if he is convicted on the gun charges he faces, prosecutors have told a federal judge.

The revelation was part of a series of filings in the case in which Special Counsel David Weiss answered Mr. Biden’s claims that he’s being unfairly targeted for crimes just because of his famous last name.

Mr. Weiss and Derek E. Hines, the senior assistant special counsel, told a judge this week that Mr. Biden’s case is actually worse than other defendants who have been charged with lying on gun background checks and possessing a firearm despite being a prohibited person.

For one thing, they said, he was a self-destructive user of cocaine, which they said is a more dangerous drug than marijuana, which accounts for many of the gun-drug cases.

They also characterized Mr. Biden as reckless, pointing out that he essentially begged to be prosecuted by bragging in his 2021 memoir about his drug-saturated life at the time he bought and owned the Colt revolver. Mr. Hines even revealed that the pouch that Mr. Biden used to store the firearm had a white powder on it that tested positive for cocaine.

“To be clear, investigators literally found drugs on the pouch where the defendant had kept his gun,” Mr. Hines wrote.

Mr. Biden has been indicted on two charges of making a false statement related to the purchase of the gun, and one charge of possessing the gun while being an unlawful drug user.

Two of those charges carry maximum sentences of 10 years, and the other carries a maximum of five years, though Mr. Biden would be unlikely to get anywhere near that much time if convicted.

Mr. Hines said the government “preliminarily estimates that the defendant’s post-trial guidelines as determined under the United States Sentencing Guidelines are 15-21 months’ imprisonment.”

Those guidelines aren’t binding on judges, but do give a sense of the potential jeopardy for Mr. Biden, who has downplayed the seriousness of the case against him.

The Washington Times has reached out to Mr. Biden’s lawyer for comment on that calculation.

The revelations came as part of a series of responses to Hunter Biden’s legal team, which last month filed motions asking a judge to dismiss the three gun charges against the president’s son. Among their reasons were that Mr. Weiss was allegedly improperly serving as special counsel, that the gun charges are unconstitutional, that Hunter Biden is the subject of vindictive prosecution, and that he is immune from prosecution because he already agreed to a diversion agreement last year.

Hunter Biden, through his lawyers, said Mr. Weiss had agreed to settle the gun charges with no prison time, but changed his mind only after former President Donald Trump and other conservatives complained.

“This is perhaps the clearest of cases of prosecutors making prosecutorial decisions for political reasons, selectively and vindictively prosecuting Mr. Biden based on his familial and political affiliation with his father, the president of the United States,” wrote defense lawyer Abbe David Lowell.

He said no other “similarly situated person” would have been charged given the facts of Hunter Biden’s case, which he described as buying “a small firearm that he owned for a mere 11 days, never loaded and never fired.” He said Mr. Weiss “traded his own judgment for the judgment of President Biden’s political enemies.”

Mr. Hines said that was a poor recounting of the actual case against Hunter Biden. In his own telling, he said the president’s son was a user of crack cocaine — a more serious drug than the marijuana that prompts many prosecutions — and his pursuit of the gun was more nefarious than the defense suggested.

He lied in order to purchase the weapon, he bought a speed loader, “ an accessory that enhanced the ability to use it in a shootout,” and he wrote a “lucrative” memoir in which he had the audacity to brag about his drug use, giving authorities even more evidence against him.

“The defendant’s choice to sell a book containing these admissions not only made the government’s case against him stronger, but also increased a potential prosecution’s general deterrence value,” Mr. Hines wrote.

As for potential sentencing, he said Mr. Biden’s criminal history is the lowest, category I. The offense level would be 14 — a calculation of the seriousness of the crime. Fraud has a base offense level of 7, while robbery has a base level of 20. If a gun was brandished, it can mean a five-point increase, and if a gun was fired it could tack on two more points, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

The revelation of the cocaine residue on the pouch raises other questions about the treatment of Hunter Biden’s case.

Prosecutors said the pouch has been held in evidence by state police in Delaware since Hallie Biden, the then-girlfriend of Hunter Biden and wife of his late brother, tossed the pouch, gun, 23 rounds of ammunition and the speed loader in a trash can at a grocery store in Wilmington in 2018.

State police never pursued any charges and kept the materials in a vault. It wasn’t until last year, when the FBI asked to take photos of the gun, that federal investigators saw the powder and figured it was cocaine. They had an FBI chemist test it, and he concluded it was cocaine.

The court filing did not say why Delaware authorities didn’t spot and test the pouch themselves during the five years they had possession of the materials.

The Times has reached out to Delaware State Police for this story.

The new prosecution filings also shed new light on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which has long been the source of speculation and misinformation.

In the days before the 2020 election, the Biden campaign helped prod senior former national security officials to denounce reporting by The New York Post on the contents of the laptop as Russian disinformation. 

But the FBI and IRS criminal investigators pursuing a tax investigation had obtained the contents of the laptop via search warrant in 2019 and knew it to be authentic. That’s particularly true because they also obtained a warrant to look at the contents of his Apple iCloud account, and prosecutors said the information was “largely duplicative” of the laptop.

It wasn’t until 2023, however, that agents got a warrant to pore over the contents for evidence of the gun crimes.

They recovered photos and messages they said were clear evidence of Hunter Biden’s drug use at the time he bought and possessed the Colt revolver in October 2018.

In one message, sent to Hallie Biden the day after he bought the gun, he told her he was waiting behind a minor league baseball stadium for Mookie, his dealer. The next day he told his girlfriend via text that he was “sleeping on a car smoking crack.”

After Hallie Biden grabbed the gun from his vehicle and dumped it, he fired off enraged texts, to which she replied: “I just want you safe. That was not safe. … You have lost your mind hunter. I’m sorry I handled it poorly today but you are in huge denial about yourself and about that reality that I just want you safe.”

In November, after authorities had the weapon, Mr. Biden continued to text about his cocaine issues. In one message he said: “I’m a [expletive] better man than any man you know whether I’m smoking crack or not.” And in December he said, “I’ll [expletive] get sober when I want to get [expletive] sober.”

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.