By Diana Glebova
Hunter Biden’s plea deal on tax misdemeanors charges is back on with further stipulations after momentarily falling apart, CNN reported Wednesday.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Biden’s legal team came to an agreement that the plea deal only pertains to charges pertaining to tax evasion and illegal gun possession, leaving him open to potential DOJ charges in the future.
Biden had been expected to plead guilty to tax misdemeanor charges Wednesday in a Delaware court, entering a plea deal with the DOJ on the tax misdemeanor charges in 2017 and 2018 and to avoid jail time on a separate gun charge. The new deal between the two legal teams also covers his tax-related conduct from 2014 to 2019, CNN reported.
The initial plea deal reportedly fell apart after the defense and prosecution did not agree on the scope of the immunity of coverage that Biden had, specifically if Biden would be covered from being charged on Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in the future.
Judge Maryellen Noreika, a Trump appointee, had asked questions to ensure Biden understood what he was pleading guilty to, and it became clear that the two legal teams were not on the same page about what the initial plea agreement had in its scope, CNN’s Evan Perez said.
The two legal teams then deliberated and came to an agreement that the plea deal would only pertain to the tax and gun charges, meaning the DOJ can charge Biden in the future on unrelated charges. (RELATED: Hunter Biden Appears In Court For Tax Charges)
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The two legal teams likely originally intended to use the plea deal as a covert way of immunizing Biden from prosecution for FARA crimes, without explicitly mentioning FARA crimes in the plea deal, or disclosing that Hunter Biden is suspected of committing FARA crimes. But that would be scandalous and unprecedented, to allow Biden to avoid any consequences for committing those serious crimes in exchange for pleading guilty merely to two misdemeanor tax offenses, when tax authorities had planned in 2021 to charge Biden with six tax felonies and five tax misdemeanors. Those tax crimes alone could have led to him spending many years in prison, as Eileen O’Connor, former head of the Tax Division, notes in today’s Wall Street Journal, in her commentary, “You’d Go to Prison for What Hunter Biden Did.” So when the Judge asked the Justice Department about the scope of the immunity covered by the plea deal, the Justice Department had to evasively deny that Biden would be immune from prosecution for any FARA crimes under the plea deal, even though the plain text of its original deal with him would have allowed him to totally escape accountability for FARA crimes.]
Noreika refused the second plea deal and asked both teams to provide more information about the plea deal. Biden is currently pleading not guilty, as the deal is currently off. [It violated standard practice to only charge Biden with a misdemeanor when there was abundant evidence he committed felonies, as was documented by federal tax authorities in over 1,000 pages of supporting evidence they compiled for an expected prosecution of Hunter Biden over those felonies].
The House Oversight Committee is currently investigating Biden’s foreign business dealings and how President Joe Biden is connected to the money that came from foreign sources like Romania, Ukraine and China.
The conservative legal group America First Legal (AFL) is suing the DOJ for allegedly failing to require the president’s son to register for FARA during the Obama administration.
