Judge Maryellen Norieka’s rejection of Hunter Biden’s so-called “sweetheart deal” put Team Biden and Special Counsel David Weiss (are we being redundant?) in a bind.
If she had just rubber-stamped it as they anticipated, then sure, there would have initially been noise once the terms of the deal became known; but would have died down soon. By rejecting the deal instead, more discussion focused on why a man who allegedly avoided taxes to the tune of upwards of a million and a half dollars, lobbied for foreign entities without registering, violated a felony gun law, and raised serious questions of possible bribery, was allowed to plea bargain it all away for two misdemeanor tax violations (with no jail time) and a laughable firearms “diversion” agreement – with a gift of blanket immunity for any other crimes he might have committed, to boot.
Not surprisingly, people focused on his status as President Joe Biden’s son, and rightly so. Attorney General Merrick Garland and David Weiss would have to explain why this sort of thing happened on their watch.
Enter The New York Times to the rescue. In a front page report on Monday, the Times posited that Hunter Biden would not be in the predicament in which he finds himself were he not his famous father’s son:
By late 2022, Mr. Weiss – who relied on the work of IRS investigators, the FBI and lawyers in the Justice Department’s tax division – had found some evidence but determined that he did not have sufficient grounds to indict Mr. Biden for major felonies, according to several people familiar with the situation. Mr. Weiss told an associate that he preferred not to bring any charges, even misdemeanors, against Mr. Biden because the average American would not be prosecuted for similar offenses. (A senior law enforcement official forcefully denied the account.)
As the U.S. Attorney for the State of Delaware, Mr. Weiss still had the duty to investigate and perhaps prosecute failure to register as a foreign agent and possible bribery of a public official, indications of which were in plain sight; yet it is now reported that he never even interviewed Hunter Biden throughout the five years he purportedly investigated him. Weiss and his boss Garland have a lot of explaining to do – especially since, when it came to Donald Trump, prosecutors showed no hesitation about exploiting every ambiguity they could find to conjure up a case against him.
