Three House committees sent a letter to attorney general Merrick Garland on Monday demanding information about Hunter Biden’s plea deal, which was put on hold by a federal judge last week after she declared the terms of the deal were “unusual.”
The younger Biden was charged in June with felony gun possession and two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018. He had been set to agree to a plea deal that included a recommendation of probation for the tax violations. Under the deal, the gun charge would have been dropped and potentially wiped from Biden’s record if he met certain conditions.
However, Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor tax charges in federal court on Wednesday after U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika put the plea deal on hold.
Now, the heads of the House Judiciary Committee, House Oversight Committee, and Ways and Means Committee are launching an inquiry into the controversial plea deal.
Noreika said Wednesday that the plea deal Biden’s lawyers reached with Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss was “unusual” and questioned why the deal contained some “non-standard terms,” such as “broad immunity” from other potential charges. Prosecutor Leo Wise acknowledged there was no precedent for the kind of deal that had been proposed.
After a discrepancy over whether the younger Biden would be immune from prosecution for possible crimes including violations related to representing foreign governments without registering, the prosecution and defense reached a revised agreement that would only cover the period from 2014-2019 and would only include conduct related to tax offenses, drug use and gun possession, CNN’s Manu Raju reported.
The judge chose to delay a decision on whether to accept the revised deal.
The leaders of the three committees — Representatives Jim Jordan, James Comer, and Jason Smith — wrote in the letter that the DOJ’s “unusual plea and pretrial diversion agreements with Mr. Biden raise serious concerns — especially when combined with recent whistleblower allegations — that the Department has provided preferential treatment toward Mr. Biden.”
The trio wrote that the Department “shifted a broad immunity provision, which benefits Mr. Biden, from the plea agreement to the pretrial diversion agreement apparently to prevent the District Court from being able to scrutinize and reject that immunity provision.”
“And then, the Department has benefitted Mr. Biden by giving up its unilateral ability to bring charges against him if it concludes that he has breached the pretrial diversion agreement,” the letter adds. “Instead, it has placed upon itself the burden of getting the District Court’s permission to bring charges even though the District Court normally has no role in policing a pretrial diversion agreement in that manner. So, the District Court is apparently removed from the equation when it helps Mr. Biden and inserted into the equation when it helps Mr. Biden.”
The lawmakers go on to express concern that despite the DOJ’s comments to the Judiciary committee, the department “may be claiming that other investigations into Mr. Biden are ongoing to shield the Department from Congressional oversight about this matter.”
The three committees ask the DOJ to submit a “generalized description of the nature of the Department’s ongoing investigation(s) concerning Hunter Biden” and “an explanation of why the Department originally agreed to a plea agreement if other investigation(s) concerning Hunter Biden are ongoing.”
The letter also requests a “list of similar pretrial diversion agreements entered into by the Department in the last ten years concerning the same charge of felony possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance” and a “list of pretrial diversion agreements entered into by the Department in the last ten years in which the Department agrees not to prosecute crimes that are unrelated to the charges being diverted.”