A stunning nugget of information dropped late Saturday night, giving us a peek into the sausage factory of Hunter Biden’s legal strategy that ultimately led to his sweetheart plea deal. It turns out that Hunter Biden wasn’t only using his father’s position in his shady business deals, but he also actively weaponized it to get an unprecedented plea deal.
The plea deal, as you know, was deemed unconstitutional by Judge Maryellen Noreika, and she rejected it — namely over the blanket immunity he would receive as part of the pretrial diversion agreement. Not only would Hunter get no jail time, but he also couldn’t be prosecuted for a multitude of crimes he’d allegedly committed, including violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The crimes that Hunter was accused of, namely using and distributing illicit drugs while illegally possessing a firearm, would not only require being charged with a felony but could also have seen him face as much as ten years in prison with a mandatory minimum of five. The pretrial diversion agreement wiped that charge clean, and it turns out Hunter’s legal team knew just how to get what they wanted.
In the fall of 2022, a notable shift occurred in Hunter Biden’s legal battle. News had leaked that federal agents believed they possessed sufficient evidence to charge Hunter with unlawfully acquiring a firearm while being a drug user. According to a report from Politico, on Halloween, Hunter’s lawyer Chris Clark, furious over the leak, used the threat of calling Joe Biden as a witness if U.S. Attorney David Weiss charged him with the gun crime.
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“President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial,” Clark wrote in a 32-page letter to the DOJ.
According to Politico, the letter and “more than 300 pages of previously unreported emails and documents exchanged between Hunter Biden’s legal team and prosecutors, sheds new light on the fraught negotiations that nearly produced a broad plea deal.”
Clark then laid out what could have been seen as a promise, a warning, or just some very zealous lawyering: He said Joe Biden would undoubtedly be a witness at trial because of leaks about the probe. He wrote that just a few weeks before sending his letter, there had been two back-to-back leaks related to Hunter Biden and the gun issue. First, someone told The Washington Post that investigators thought Biden deserved tax and gun charges. Then a few days later, The Daily Mail reported on a voicemail Joe Biden left for his son in the window of time when he allegedly owned the gun. Surely the back-to-back leaks were part of a coordinated campaign to push the Justice Department to charge his client with crimes. And, Clark said, the leaks prompted the president to address his son’s legal woes the next day on CNN.
“There can be no doubt that these leaks have inserted President Biden into this case,” he said.
In short, Biden’s legal team effectively pressured the DOJ to kill the gun charge by forcing a constitutional crisis by placing the president in direct opposition to his very own Justice Department. “This of all cases justifies neither the spectacle of a sitting President testifying at a criminal trial nor the potential for a resulting Constitutional crisis,” Clark wrote.
The threat worked. Weiss and his team offered Hunter Biden the pretrial diversion. This appears to be proof that the Department of Justice gave Hunter the sweetheart plea deal after the threat of getting Joe Biden involved. Did this situation impact Weiss’ choice? This revelation adds yet another layer to the question of why Attorney General Merrick Garland violated DOJ regulations to appoint Weiss as special counsel.
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