If you are trying to pull off a corrupt deal — one that is actually political theater, but that you are trying to masquerade as law — you’d better make sure the judge is in on it.
When it came to that little detail, the Biden administration dropped the ball.
Judge Maryellen Noreika instead did her job.
That is why Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea bargain blew up in Delaware federal court today.
Understand what was happening here.
In every normal criminal case, in every legitimate investigation, you have adversarial parties — the defense looking out for the accused’s interest and, critically, the Justice Department looking out for the public interest.
That means government attorneys being appropriately aggressive in prosecuting lawbreakers.
In fact, Justice Department plea-bargain standards generally call for requiring the defendant to plead guilty to, at a minimum, the most serious, readily provable charge.
The Biden investigation is continuing — even expanding — but we already know the Justice Department could have readily proved serious tax felonies (involving more than $10 million in income) and a gun offense carrying a potential 10-year sentence.
Alas, there’s nothing standard about the Hunter Biden case. That’s because the parties are not adversaries. They are in cahoots.
Thus did the president’s son and the president’s Justice Department conspire to orchestrate a plea deal that would (a) allow Hunter Biden to escape prison and be given immunity from future prosecution over the Biden family business of cashing in on President Biden’s political influence, and (b) allow the Biden administration to pretend that, with independence and integrity, the president had allowed his Justice Department to prosecute his own son.
Follow The Post’s latest coverage on Hunter Biden’s plea deal
On the egregious facts already known about Hunter’s conduct and the Biden family business, there would have been no way to consummate such a deal unless the judge was in on the scheme.
Judge Noreika was not in on it. She is the one who acted with independence and integrity, declining to let the Biden family and the Biden Justice Department turn her into a rubber stamp for their corruption.
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Part of what can make a plea bargain a sweetheart plea bargain is how it’s framed. That’s especially true in political cases.
The point of plea agreements, by which the vast majority of criminal cases are settled, is to spell out in exacting detail the complete understanding of the parties. It’s a contract.
If something goes wrong down the road, if one of the parties breaches the terms, the clarity of the agreement puts everyone on notice of the consequences.
Here though, because the defendant and the prosecution were not adversaries as in normal criminal cases, they could not spell out their one-sided agreement. Doing so would have been too politically damaging — and this was all about politics.
Both Hunter Biden and the Biden Justice Department wanted an arrangement that would give Hunter the maximum amount of immunity from prosecution for the minimum amount of criminal admissions they thought they could get away with.
But there would have been scandal if prosecutors had written an agreement that said: Hunter pleads guilty to two trivial misdemeanor counts for years 2018 and 2019 with the expectation of no jail time, and the government further makes a firearms felony disappear; in exchange, the Justice Department will not prosecute him for any other tax crimes, money laundering, felony failure to register as a foreign agent, bribery conspiracy, or any other criminal offenses arising out of his business dealings from 2014 to 2019.
So instead, with a nod and a wink, the Justice Department wrote a plea agreement saying merely that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges in satisfaction of the conduct covering all tax years from 2014 through 2019.
This would allow Hunter to walk away saying the case was over and claiming immunity for not only tax crimes but for any criminal offense arising out of his years of lucrative business dealings. For its part, the Justice Department would say, “The agreement settling the tax offenses speaks for itself. Beyond that, we, of course, cannot comment because that could compromise an ongoing investigation.”
Get it? Hunter quietly walks away with a complete pass, the Justice Department clams up, the “ongoing investigation” slips into the great black hole that it has been all along, never again to be heard of, and Joe Biden goes on the campaign trail bragging about how he fearlessly let his Justice Department prosecute his own son with — all together now — independence and integrity.
It didn’t happen that way because, thankfully, one federal judge did her duty.
Judge Noreika didn’t have to do much: just ask Hunter Biden’s defense lawyers and the Biden Justice Department prosecutors what, exactly, they had agreed to.
The Biden Justice Department didn’t dare say that publicly, so the sweetheart deal went up in smoke.
Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor.
