Hunter Biden’s legal team reportedly threatened prosecutors last year that they would put President Joe Biden on the witness stand for the defense if any charges were brought against the president’s son.
Summary
Hunter Biden’s legal team reportedly threatened prosecutors last year that they would put President Joe Biden on the witness stand for the defense if any charges were brought against the president’s son.
- “President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial,” Hunter Biden attorney Chris Clark wrote in a 32-page letter to prosecutors, Politico reported.
- Biden’s attorneys put the political nature of the case front-and-center in their communications with the 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 in the memo.
- Hunter Biden’s attorneys agreed to an unorthodox plea deal where he would plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges and participate in a pre-trial diversion program in lieu of being charged with a felony gun possession charge. The diversion agreement included a sweeping immunity provision from future charges related to influence peddling and other matters under investigation by the DOJ.
- The plea deal collapsed under judicial scrutiny. Judge Maryellen Noreika questioned the virtually unprecedented nature of the immunity provisions and the decision to squirrel away those provisions in the diversion agreement instead of the plea deal.
- A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found 48% of Americans are not confident in the Biden DOJ’s handling of the Hunter Biden investigation. A paltry 32% of Americans expressed confidence in that the investigation is being conducted in a “fair and nonpartisan matter.”
- The New York Times reported on the inside story of the plea deal’s implosion: “Earlier this year, The Times found, Mr. Weiss appeared willing to forgo any prosecution of Mr. Biden at all, and his office came close to agreeing to end the investigation without requiring a guilty plea on any charges. But the correspondence reveals that his position, relayed through his staff, changed in the spring, around the time a pair of I.R.S. officials on the case accused the Justice Department of hamstringing the investigation. Mr. Weiss suddenly demanded that Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses.”
- Axios noted that the president could still end up taking the witness stand, as the collapse of Hunter’s plea deal has made the prospects of a criminal trial for Hunter Biden much more likely.
- The Washington Post uncovered the ties between David Weiss, the special counsel heading the Hunter Biden investigation, and Beau Biden, Hunter’s late elder brother. “When Delaware’s acting U.S. attorney David C. Weiss celebrated a fraud conviction in 2010, he was joined by a key partner in the case: Beau Biden, the state’s attorney general… Today, that little-known history highlights the deep challenges Weiss faces as he pursues a newly recharged investigation into Beau’s brother, Hunter Biden, in a small state long politically dominated by their father.”
- National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy examined the “chicanery” of the Hunter Biden plea deal. “In our adversarial system, this is how prosecutors vindicate the public’s interests in the rule of law and equal treatment. Weiss and the Biden DOJ, to the contrary, acted as Hunter’s second set of defense lawyers. Predictably, given the Justice Department’s impossible conflict of interest in this case, Weiss sought to serve and protect the president. On the surface, that meant insulating Hunter from real prosecution.”
- The New York Post reported the appointment of Weiss as special counsel “will allow him to bring charges without the approval of Biden appointees in other districts that blocked Weiss’s previous efforts to charge Hunter with millions of dollars with of tax fraud charges. Hunter is expected to stand trial in either Washington DC or Southern California.”
- Fox News noted “Clark withdrew from Hunter’s defense team last week, though it is unclear whether the decision came in relation to the leak of the document to Politico. Hunter pleaded not guilty to federal tax and gun charges in late July after a previous plea agreement fell apart. Republicans had widely criticized the previous deal as far too lenient.”
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
