Part I of "Hunter Was Too Clever by Half": The Plea Bargain
(Part I and Part II and Part III)
When I say “Hunter”, I mean his lawyers, of course, not Hunter Biden. He may have a Yale law degree, courtesy of his senator-father’s pull, but although people do pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars for “legal services”, nobody would pay him anything for legal services.
What’s just happened is that Attorney-General Merrick Garland appointed a Special Counsel to investigate Hunter’s tax crimes. But this started earlier, with lots of interesting legal technicalities and strategizing that I’ll try to lay out here. I think I’ll write this quickly rather than accurately, so please do correct me, since people are interested in things right now. Corrections will be easy to add later, and links to documents, if anybody actually reads this, so I’ll work from memory.1
It all began because Hunter Biden, son of then-Vice-President Joe Biden, was selling access to his father for large sums of money from 2013 to 2016 and for smaller sums from 2017 to 2019, after Joe left office. Hunter didn’t file his tax returns, and he didn’t pay his taxes. The IRS stumbled onto this while doing a sex investigation of some kind, and started investigating Hunter’s tax situation. They found that eventually Hunter did start filing tax returns again, but false ones, the falsity being a combination of complicated fraud with partnership accounting and simple fraud with business deductions for sex-business costs such as first-class flights for prostitutes. The IRS did a multi-year investigation, hampered by obstruction from the Justice Department, which wouldn’t let the IRS agents attend key meetings, warned the witnesses in advance that they were going to be interviewed, and warned Hunter that a building was going to be searched for documents. Eventually the Justice Department attorney in charge, Delaware U.S. Attorney Weiss, said that contrary to his earlier statements he didn’t have authority to file charges in D.C., and the Justice Dept. and the D.C. U.S. Attorney wouldn’t cooperate, and the IRS would just have to let the 2014 and 2015 tax year investigation go to waste because the statute of limitations was running out.
The IRS agents were fed up by this time. This was the last straw, plus in 2023 the House of Representatives had just come under Republican control. There was nothing they could do while Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress, but now they could go to the House and make a whistleblower complaint under a special statute that would keep them from getting fired if the House protected them. Note here the corruption of the Democrats in Congress- the IRS agents couldn’t do this earlier, or they would just have been laughed at and demoted. At any rate, IRS agents Shapley and Ziegler testified in May to July 2023 in great detail.2
This was troublesome. Hunter’s tax crimes, which amounted to over a million dollars of clearly intentional non-filing and non-payment (Hunter was repeatedly told by his accountants to file and pay), together with Hunter’s large income and sordid spending, were now public information, though of course nonreporting by the regime media meant people who read The New York Times had never heard of it. Also, it was becoming ever more clear as to how sordid Hunter and Joe’s partnership was— it wasn’t just selling access and favors to ordinary, respectable, American companies, it was selling it to Chinese and Ukrainian companies of very dubious reputations. That would have Hunter lobbying on behalf of foreign governments without being registered as a foreign lobbyist, which would open up investigation into exactly who he was lobbying for and what Joe was providing and how the money was shared, e.g. into bribery and blackmail. One thread unravels the whole suit of clothes. And the Democrats might not control the Justice Department after 2024.
This is whether the lawyers started being clever. In May 2024, the Justice Department announced that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of not filing taxes (or was it not paying taxes?— I’d have to look it up) and would agree to a sort of probation in exchange for not being prosecuted for the felony of owning a gun while ingesting illegal drugs.
What’s so clever about that? Well, before seeing the Plea Bargain and Diversion Agreement, here is what we expected the scheme to be. Hunter’s tax crimes would be felonies for anybody else. He stole one or two million dollars from the U.S. government by not paying his taxes. The variety of tax crimes is bewildering, and I don’t know how they decide which to charge and whether as misdemeanors or felonies. There are several tax years, each a separate crime. It is a crime not to file. It is a separate crime not to pay (you might file but not include a check, or vice versa). It is a separate crime to make false statements on a return. All these crimes would be extremely easy to prove in Hunter’s case, far easier than in a typical tax evasion case involving fancy schemes and careful cover-ups. The scheme was for the Justice Department to just charge two misdemeanors of intentional failure to pay, with a maximum penalty of two years in jail plus hefty penalties, perhaps up to twice the amount evaded. Instead of asking for the maximum penalty, though, Justice would make a plea bargain with Hunter in which he would plead guilty, and in exchange for that, Justice would agree to recommend to the judge that the penalty be probation and a zero fine, just payment of the back taxes and civil penalties with interest, and would also agree not to prosecute Hunter for any tax crimes from the years 2014 to 2019.3 (The civil penalties couldn’t be avoided, because the IRS controls them, and the IRS is honest compared to the Justice Department, with too little control of details by the President for him to stop the computer and the agents from making his son pay taxes.) The plea agreement would be binding on the next Administration too, so Hunter would in effect have zero punishment plus immunity for all his other tax crimes. The only risk was that the judge might not accept the Justice Department’s recommended penalty.4
That is what I and other Hunter-watchers expected. But this is where the “too clever by half” part comes in. The plea agreement I described would fix Hunter’s tax crimes, but it wouldn’t help with the bribery and foreign agent crimes, the crimes that would implicate his father, President Joe Biden. And protecting Joe Biden was the primary objective. How could that be done?5
What actually happened was that there were two plea bargain documents presented to the court, not one. The first was the Plea Bargain, as I will call it using capitalization. This said that Hunter would plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors, and in exchange the Justice Department would agree to recommend a sentence of probation but no fine to the judge. Hunter was *not* granted immunity for prosecution for any other crimes, tax crimes or otherwise. The Plea Bargain included a Statement of Facts at the end, as is typical of plea bargains, telling how Hunter had earned income and what taxes he had paid, in broad terms, but not detailing the fraud except to talk about his not filing returns and not sending in any check at all till later, and talking a lot about his drug use and rehab treatments, to make it look as if he was zonked out of his mind for several years and was just acting crazy, rather than thinking up complicated partnership schemes and deducting a sex club membership as a business expense.6
The second document was the Diversion Agreement. It dealt with Hunter’s gun crimes. Hunter agreed that for two years he wouldn’t own a gun, wouldn’t drink alcohol, would notify the authorities if he travelled abroad, etc., and the Justice Department agreed that they would not prosecute him for the felony of owning a gun while ingesting illegal drugs.
This seems very odd. Hunter had bought a gun and then dumped it in a trashcan not far from a school and blamed some nearby minorities; I forget whether black or hispanic, since he’s blamed each on occasion. This is embarassing and wrong, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would get you prosecuted. True, it is a felony to lie on a background check when you buy a gun, and another felony if you ingest illegal drugs while owning a gun, but these are “pretend crimes”. We have, alas, many federal crimes like this. Lying to an FBI agent is another one, notorious in the Martha Stewart case. These are felonies, with the possibility of spending five years in a maximum security prison, but they are not malum in se, they are not immoral acts. And the Justice Department hardly ever brings charges against people who commit these crimes unless they have ulterior motives. Sometimes the ulterior motive is bad, as when Martha Stewart was charged because she was Martha Stewart. Usually the ulterior motive is good, as when a drug dealer pleads guilty to gun possession while smoking meth as part of a plea deal so he can only be sentenced to five years instead of the twenty years he’d get for his real crimes. It’s a corrupt system. It’s so corrupt, in fact, that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals just this summer struck down the “gun possession while ingesting illegal drugs” law as unconstitutional, because it violates the right of drug users to hold and bear arms for feeble reasons. The Justice Department would *never* charge a white-collar, otherwise innocent, professional man with this offense, at least if he didn’t vote for Trump, and I’d have thought you were crazy if you said they’d charge the President’s son. And why charge him with that when they don’t charge him with real crimes such as drug possession, solicitation of prostitutes across state lines, failing to register as a foreign agent, felony tax evasion, bribery, and who knows what else?
And why submit the Diversion Agreement to the Court at all? The Plea Bargain and the Diversion Agreement are each stand-alone documents. The Plea Bargain is about tax crimes; the Diversion agreement is about gun crimes. Each says that it is a complete contract between the United States and Mr. Robert Hunter Biden, valid even if the other one is not. The Plea Bargain had to be filed in court, since it involved a guilty plea and the judge had to make sure the defendant understood what he was doing. The Diversion Agreement didn’t need filing in court; it’s just a contract in which the Justice Department is agreeing not to go to court at all. It has a place for the Probation Officer to sign (Margaret M. Bray), but no judge needs to sign off.
And why file in Delaware? The tax and gun crimes took place in D.C. and California, so why choose the venue of Delaware?
The reason is Paragraph 15. I didn’t mention quite all of the Diversion Agreement. At the end, it says that the Justice Department will do a bit more than just not prosecute this gun crime in exchange for Hunter staying sober for two years. It says that the Justice Department will also not prosecute any other gun crimes. You might expect that too. But the kicker is that in exchange for Hunter staying sober for two yeras, the Justice Department also won’t charge him for anything the State of Facts in the Plea Bargain talks about.
Although the Plea Bargain didn’t give Hunter immunity from prosecution for his other tax crimes, the Diversion Agreement does! And it goes further. It gives him immunity against prosecution “for any federal crimes encompassed by” the Plea Bargain’s Statement of Facts! Since the Plea Bargain’s Statement of Facts talks about Biden working for foreign companies and earning income from influence peddling, this arguably gives Hunter immunity from prosecution for lots of other crimes, crimes that don’t even have to be specified by name. And if it gives him immunity from prosecution, it gives him immunity from investigation, which means it gives Joe immunity from investigation since he can be got at only via Hunter. All without admitting that that’s what they’re doing.
It gets even better for Hunter. If it were clear that he had immunity from prosecution for his income-related crimes, he could be called on by Congress to testify about them and he couldn’t plead the 5th Amendment since he’d have no criminal liability to worry about. Also, the Justice Department would have to stop its investigation into those crimes. Currently, the Justice Department is engaged in an investigation of Hunter’s other crimes, though it is a fake investigation, probably with no FBI agents or prosecutors assigned to it. Rather, the purpose of the investigation is to be able to tell Congress that the Attorney-General, the FBI Director, FBI agents, and Justice Department attorneys can’t testify about Hunter Biden “because an investigation is ongoing”. If Hunter clearly had immunity, the fake investigation would have to stop, and the excuse would evaporate. So what the Diversion Agreement was supposed to do was to give Hunter immunity if it came to a real investigation, where he could object in court, but so unclearly that the Justice Department could get away with its fake investigation.
So this explains why Hunter was charged with gun possession. Pretend crimes are usually used to put people in prison when they haven’t really done much wrong. Here, the beauty is that this pretend crime is used to keep Hunter out of prison when he really has done a lot of things that are wrong. It’s just a peg from which to hang Paragraph 15, which in effect is a pardon for any crimes, known of unknown, that he might have committed during the Obama and Trump presidential terms.
This also explains why the case was filed in Delaware. Hunter needed a friendly judge. The two places in the world the Bidens have the most friends are Washington, D.C. and Delaware. The judges in D.C. are the most corrupt in the country, and the appeals court is safely composed of Democratic hacks, unlike the 3rd Circuit, where Delaware is. But the whole point of the Diversion Agreement was obscurity. If the plea hearing was held in a courthouse in Washington, D.C., reporters and pesky political junkies could just take the Metro to get there. Lots of them could just walk from home, or take a bicycle if walking was too unsafe. Delaware is a train ride away, which is too far for reporters or political tourists. If there were no spectators, only the judge would have to be fooled, and with luck, the judge, picked randomly, would be either stupid, sleepy that day, or a good Democrat. And the Plea Bargain and Diversion Agreement would be purposely delayed, filed with the court only on the day of the hearing so the judge couldn’t read them in advance.
This is a good place to stop, with appropriate suspense. I’ll publish this and continue later for another part or two, with what happened in the Delaware and with what options are open now for thwarting Hunter’s halfway clever plans.
(Part I and Part II and Part III)
Footnotes
You can look up all the relevant documents at my Hunter Biden Plea Bargain link page at
https://www.rasmusen.org/rasmapedia/index.php?title=Hunter_Biden_Plea_Bargain.
Ziegler’s counsel was Dean Zerbe, a whistleblower lawyer I’d met during my Citigroup case and for whom I have great respect.
All these tax crimes are separate from civil tax violations. Making mistakes on your taxes is very common, and if they’re not clearly intentional, the IRS will not charge you with a crime. Even if they *are* intentional— filing late when you know you’re passing the deadline, or sending in too small a check because you’re short on cash— the IRS is very reasonable, contrary to what some people say. Instead, the IRS will just tell you what to do, and make you pay a penalty of, say, 30% of the amount underpaid. This is a “civil penalty”. You can contest it in court if you want, but usually people just pay up. Long after the investigation started, a lawyer paid about $2 million in back taxes and penalties for Hunter, satisfying his “civil liability”, and Hunter filed his returns. Hunter said at his plea bargain hearing that the amount is just a loan, with interest to be paid, not a gift. Note that you cannot get out of the crime of tax evasion just by paying late, any more than you can get out of burglary by bringing back the TV set.
The risk that the judge would refuse to follow the prosecutor’s recommendation of probation and zero fine was a real risk, and any honest judge would impose jail time and a hefty fine. Many judges aren’t honest, though, and would want to help the Democrats, especially if Justice filed the case in a highly pro-Biden court just as D.C., Delaware, New York City, or Rhode Island. It still might be worth it to get as absurdly short a sentence as two years (or one year if served concurrently), especially since Hunter was used to spending time in institutions because of his numerous inpatient drug cures.
An alternative strategy would be to propose a different kind of plea deal, a “take-it-or-leave-it” one where Hunter would plead guilty only if the judge agreed in advance to a sentence of probation. There, though, the risk was that an honest judge would just turn down the plea agreement entirely.
Protecting Hunter Biden mattered too, but indirectly. The problem with letting Hunter hang out to dry for his tax and drug crimes was that he knew too much. The deal, implicit or explicit, was that Hunter would make money for Joe, and Joe would protect Hunter. If Joe broke the deal, Hunter would happily spill his guts to the Republicans and Joe would go to prison for many years. Thus, Hunter’s main concern was not prosecution, but preventing himself from committing suicide. Note that this would not require Joe to assist his son’s suicide; Joe is unlikely to be running any of this operation personally, or, indeed, to be capable of thinking coherently at all.
The IRS agent hearings have lots of details. One amusing detail that I think came from somewhere else is that Hunter was actually kicked out of the sex club for not living up to its standards of behavior.