The collapse of Hunter’s sweetheart plea deal has revealed the rottenness of the Biden administration.
All it took was for a judge to ask a few simple questions, and Hunter Biden’s cushy plea deal with the US government blew up right in the middle of a courtroom.
On Wednesday, Judge Maryellen Noreika refused to accept an agreement worked out between the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and lawyers for Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s troubled 53-year-old son. Normally, judicial approvals for plea deals are perfunctory, but Judge Noreika smelled a rat. She variously described the deal as ‘not standard, not what I normally see’, possibly ‘unconstitutional’, without legal precedent and potentially ‘not worth the paper it is printed on’.
The last-minute halt by Judge Noreika was just the latest twist in a politically charged DoJ investigation, which began in 2018, into Hunter’s finances, business dealings and notorious drug and alcohol addiction (for years, photos of a naked Hunter taking drugs, brandishing guns and lying about with prostitutes have been splayed across the media).
When the DoJ first announced the plea agreement in June, Republicans and other critics slammed it as a ‘sweetheart’ deal. Hunter would have pleaded guilty to two tax misdemeanours (rather than felonies), and would have avoided gun-related charges by enrolling in a two-year ‘diversion’ programme for nonviolent offenders. But the deal’s terms, as disclosed in the courtroom this week, were in fact much more favourable to Biden than they initially seemed – outrageously so.
As Judge Noreika pointed out, a paragraph hidden away in the diversion part of the agreement gave Biden broad immunity from prosecution, in perpetuity, for a range of potential crimes. That included illegal foreign lobbying, which the DoJ had claimed it was still investigating.
It was truly an unprecedented agreement. ‘Have you ever seen a diversion agreement that is so broad that it encompasses crimes in another case?’, asked Noreika. ‘No, your honour’, admitted Leo Wise, the DoJ’s lead prosecutor.
Once the judge had publicly exposed this backdoor attempt to give Hunter blanket immunity, the DoJ’s Wise changed his tune. The deal didn’t preclude prosecuting Biden for other potential crimes, including violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, he then tried to say – even though the terms of the deal, as written, did not allow the DoJ to try him for such crimes.
