Hunter Biden plea deal a scam from the start
Byron York
HUNTER BIDEN PLEA DEAL A SCAM FROM THE START. Experienced observers knew there was something funny about the Justice Department‘s plea agreement with Hunter Biden from the moment it was announced on June 20. There were two big flashing signs.
The first sign was that the two sides made wildly differing statements about what the agreement was. On the day the deal was made, Chris Clark, Biden’s attorney, said that with the agreement, “It is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.” Biden’s side was clear: It’s over.
On the other side, the DOJ, in its announcement of the agreement, said: “The investigation is ongoing.”
Whoa. Which was it? Was the five-year investigation resolved, or was it going forward? It is extremely suspicious when two sides have purportedly reached an agreement and then make fundamentally different claims about its basic provisions.
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The second big flashing sign was that the DOJ did not release the written agreement. A date was set, July 26, for a judge to approve the deal, but the DOJ would not reveal the details of the deal, even though they were written down and would normally have been made public. Now, even after the hearing on Wednesday, and after the agreement was discussed in open court for three hours, and after Judge Maryellen Noreika declined to approve it pending further clarification — even now, the DOJ has not released the agreement.
Fortunately, Politico has published what is clearly a bootleg copy of the agreement — it’s photos of a printed copy. The first part deals with Biden’s agreement to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges for not paying taxes. The second part deals with dropping a gun charge against Biden. That was the part about which the judge had serious objections.
You can make all sorts of points against the DOJ agreeing to drop the gun charge. After all, this was a drug addict lying to buy a gun and then waving it around in various drug crazes. That seems like one scenario the nation’s gun laws were designed to prevent or punish. But the big objection to the gun charge agreement was something else. It was a provision, buried deep inside the document, that could have been a get-out-of-jail-free card for nearly everything Biden has done.
This is from Sol Wisenberg, a former prosecutor for independent counsel Kenneth Starr: “A broad immunity provision (arguably covering every crime Hunter may have committed during the relevant time frame) was hidden in Paragraph 15 of the Pre-Trial Diversion Agreement and this was done by the parties in order that the judge could not accept or reject the broad immunity portion of the overall deal. Totally unprecedented.”
Paragraph 15 said the government “agrees not to criminally prosecute Biden … for any federal crimes” involving the behavior covered by both the tax charge agreement and the gun charge agreement. So if prosecutors, for example, decided that Biden was representing a foreign government in the course of his shady overseas financial dealings, he might be charged with violating the law requiring him to register as a foreign agent. But Paragraph 15, buried in the gun charge agreement, would have forbidden that.
Why was it done this way, “totally unprecedented,” in Wisenberg’s words? It seems entirely possible that the DOJ and the Biden defense team were trying to pull a fast one on the judge. Indeed, Wisenberg noted the transcript of the hearing “shows that the judge didn’t even see the key paragraph until shortly before the hearing.” Whatever the case, it didn’t work. Noreika put a stop to the proceedings and ordered both sides to work something else out.
In the meantime, Biden has now been formally charged with the two misdemeanor tax charges. He pleaded not guilty, even though he had been ready to plead guilty just minutes earlier.
Now, we have to learn more about what happened. It’s an outrage that the DOJ has not even released the plea agreement and that we are all going on somebody’s cellphone photos of the agreement posted in Politico. (And thanks to Politico for doing it.) “It’s a scandal that it hasn’t been released,” Wisenberg said. “It ought to be released immediately by the attorney general. His failure to release it adds to the suspicion that this is a tainted deal.”
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