Hunter Biden’s tentative federal plea agreement is bound to displease partisans on both sides, one sign that it’s a fair and suitable disposition of the long-standing investigation of the president’s son.
The deal revealed in court papers Tuesday requires the younger Biden to plead guilty to two misdemeanors stemming from a failure to pay taxes owed for 2017 and 2018. The government also levels a felony charge that Biden lied about his drug use when he acquired a gun in 2018. Rather than require him to plead guilty to that crime, the government agrees to drop the charge if Biden keeps his nose clean for two years under a practice known as pretrial diversion.
Biden haters will assail the arrangement as a sweetheart deal proving that the Justice Department is in the tank for President Joe Biden. Hater-in-chief Donald Trump has already accused the “corrupt Biden DOJ” of giving Hunter Biden a “traffic ticket.”
The charge is of course spurious: Not only President Biden but also Attorney General Merrick Garland kept their hands off the case. Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump holdover, was allowed to remain in office precisely so that he could finish the case, even though new administrations typically appoint their own top prosecutors.
That arrangement kept the case at arm’s length from the administration but could warrant an objection from Biden’s defenders. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia once observed of special prosecutors, Weiss’ presence exerted a nearly irresistible pull toward bringing some charge against Hunter Biden. A dismissal of the case might have been plausible given an unremarkable defendant and a prosecutor appointed through the standard process, but it was basically off the table from the time Weiss was allowed to stay in office to oversee this case.