The Daily Signal - BUSTED: Why Hunter Biden-Justice Department Plea Deal Collapsed

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

Hunter Biden and his lawyers walked into a courtroom prepared to enter a plea deal with the Justice Department last week. The deal fell through.  President Joe Biden’s son was prepared to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and to lying on a gun purchase form. The DOJ lawyers and the younger Biden’s attorneys were ready to sign off on the deal in court, but U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika said she had no intention to “rubber-stamp” the deal.  Why?  Mike Howell, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, says the plea deal granted the president's son “global immunity for all other conduct.” Asked if he would sign onto the deal if that immunity agreement was removed, Hunter Biden said “no,” according to Howell. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) The Justice Department was offering him “a 'get-out-of-jail-free card' for any future charges that may be brought,” Howell says.  Howell joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain the role the Oversight Project played in uncovering the details of the plea deal, and what's likely next for Hunter Biden. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The thing the American people are concerned about is all of this evidence they've been confronted with on an international pay-to-play scheme involving people who are adverse to the U.S. and the most corrupt regions of the world with Joe Biden, the President of the United States, being the product that was sold. This is the daily little podcast for Monday, July 31st. I'm Virginia Allen. And that was Mike Howell, director of the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project. Hunter Biden's plea deal with the Justice Department fell apart last week. Howell joins us here on the show to explain why and what happens next. Hal also explains three key policy issues that the Biden administration would prefer the American people just not pay attention to and why that is all the more reason to watch these issues closely. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. Conservative women are problematic women. Why? Because we don't adhere to the agenda of the radical left. Every Thursday morning on the Problematic Women podcast, Kristen I, Cammer, Lauren Evans, and me, Virginia Allen, are joined by other conservative women to break down the big issues and news you care about. Whether you're interested in hot takes and conversations on pop culture or what Congress is up to, problematic women has you covered.

We sort through the news to keep you up to date on the issues that are of particular interest to conservative leaning that is problematic. Women. Find problematic women wherever you like to listen to podcasts and follow the show on Instagram. It is my pleasure to welcome to the show today. Mike Hal. Mike is the director of the oversight project here at the Heritage Foundation. Mike, thanks for being with us. Hey, thanks for having me. So we've talked a little bit about the oversight project on the show before, but it is one of the newest initiatives of the Heritage Foundation. Go ahead, give us just a quick overview of what you all do. Absolutely. So the oversight project is a recognition that oversight and investigations is where the game's at right now. I mean, Congress has been broken for a very long time. Major legislation does not pass, only budget-related things.

The administrative state basically creates policy in this country. And so the institutional right of which, you know, Heritage is a huge part needs to reflect that. We can't just be pumping the, you know, Capitol Hill with policy papers. We need to actually bring some receipts on things. And as a former, you know, Hill investigator, an attorney who then went into the Trump administration to defend against this type of stuff, I came to the realization that the outside did not support those efforts in the way that the left does. The left is light years ahead of us in this. I mean, if you just look at what they were able to do to the country during the Trump years in terms of just developing a Russia hoax out of whole cloth, pumping the intelligence community

with fake news that turned into actual criminal prosecutions, things that are still happening today, they're playing a completely different game. So we've been sitting, you know, back writing papers and arguing about policy, well, they've been taking advantage of power. And so we build a team here, comprised of investigators and litigators. And what we do is, you know, investigate. We got a lot of very talented people with great backgrounds who go out, find facts, talk to people. And then we take advantage of information laws. I mean, the big one is the FOIA law, Freedom of Information Act, and then state-level information laws and other legal options available to us and go there and actually aggressively litigate these things.

because that's the problem is in a perfect world, the way the system was set up, it was supposed to be an administrative system. You as a citizen and I should be able to request any documents who want out of the government so long as they aren't classified or otherwise privileged. And it's 2023. We have chat GPT. We have backend searches, massive computing power. It should be the easiest time in the world to get information out. But the administrative state has basically forced it into a judicial process. They'll ignore you on the administrative side and you have to have lawyers to sue. So your everyday citizen can enforce those rights. So that's what we do.

We go in and we litigate these things aggressively, get the information out, get it to its highest and best value, and try to drive the oversight and investigations, agenda. I like to think of the oversight project as a good dose of sunlight, that you all are bringing things to the forefront that the American people otherwise might not be aware of. So with that in mind, let's take a little bit of time and talk about Hunter Biden and some of the latest news we are seeing on Hunter. So on Thursday on the Daily Siddles top news edition, we had your colleague, Kyle Bosnan, on to talk a little bit about the situation that we're seeing play out in a courtroom in Delaware this past week. We saw that Hunter Biden was ready to sign off on a plea deal, and that plea deal fell through. So let's start all the way at the beginning. What are the charges that Hunter Biden is facing here? So he was facing two tax charges for failure to pay taxes and a gun charge.

He lied about being addicted to all sorts of drugs and under the influence as he possessed a gun. And so those are the three charges that they actually brought against him. And then they were playing him down to basically misdemeanor and diversion agreements, really a slap on the wrist type stuff. But I mentioned tax and guns. The thing the American people are concerned about is all of this evidence they've been confronted with on an international pay-to-play scheme involving people who are adverse to the U.S. and the most corrupt regions of the world with Joe Biden, the President of the United States, being the product that was sold in this international tens of millions of dollars paid to play scheme. And the fact that they brought,

they being the DOJ, such lesser charges, was absurd. And so what their game plan was, and we sniffed this out, was they were using that plea deal to also grant global immunity for all of their conduct. And so if you plead guilty to a tax thing, we will give you future immunity, basically won't bring charges on any of the international pay-to-play scheme, to include foreign registration laws, all the like. An investigation, which is still allegedly ongoing, according to the government, by the way. So they were offering in the middle of investigation into all the other things, which I don't believe is really forcefully ongoing, a get out of jail free card for any future charges that may be brought.

And so this is what we brought to the attention of the federal judge in Delaware. We were able to put together a 850-page amicus brief. We were the first ones to file such a brief. Chairman Jason Smith of Ways and Means Committee filed one a little after us. But we basically said, Judge, you've got to pump the brakes on this for a whole host of reasons with that being the biggest. Also, and this gets complicated, but this is why we have an oversight project, we're suing in D.C. For a set of communications between this supposedly independent investigation and Maine DOJ. So what that means is the political interference into the Hunter Biden investigation.

They admitted to us because we sued them and forced this admission. They're 2,500 plus pages of communications between the supposedly independent investigation and David Weiss is the attorney bringing him and then folks at main justice and elsewhere. And so there shouldn't be that many communications if it was actually independent. Okay. So Mike, let me just make sure I'm understanding this correctly. So what happened was the DOJ and Hunter Biden's attorneys, essentially worked out a deal that would provide cover for Hunter Biden in any future, possibly

coming down the line legal trouble that Hunter Biden might, could have, would have been facing. And the oversight project found that, flagged it in casual terms to the judge who was looking at this case, correct? Yep. Okay. So you were in the courtroom in Delaware when this all. went down. Talk a little bit about the atmosphere, what it was like and what the judge said. Absolutely. It was a wild time made for TV. Now, they don't let cameras into federal courthouses,

so it's a shame. Only the 50 or so people that were in there saw this up close and in person. But essentially, the judge started out. It was like a three-hour deal, I would say, all said and done. But there's a whole host of unusual and peculiarities with this plea deal. And the judge basically walked through those. And at first, they tried to argue that they were presenting a plea deal that the judge had no discretion over. Her role was to be the rubber stamp. And I think that brought some offense to the judge. There was highly unusual in that regard. And then as they started working through the deal itself, you know, came across this provision that, you know, the global immunity provision, if you will.

And the judge asked if there's any other ongoing investigations. And DOJ basically had to admit, yeah, we do have other stuff. And the judge said, well, would this plea deal prevent you from charging any of that other stuff? They said, yeah, that's the purpose of the plea deal, essentially. And then Hunter was asked by the judge if he would sign the plea deal without that in there. And to which he said no. And at that point, the deal was going down. It was a sink and chip.

There was full panic going on, tons of running around side conversations, Hunter's huge legal team, DOJ. And the atmosphere changed because I think, you know, you go into court and you see people on two sides of two separate tables and you expect them to be adverse to each other, right? It's the government and the people charging an individual for breaking their laws. You expect it to be an adverse process. That's our legal system. But what was kind of exposed there is they were on the same team. They all wanted this to go away. They wanted the deal done and they wanted to wipe their hands clean of this and prevent this from dragging out and having any political impacts.

And so when it was, you know, found out that this position would not stay in the deal, things fell apart. And they fell apart pretty quickly. It was a great sight to see. So what happens next and what kind of deal would a judge likely accept in the situation? Right. So there's three options in descending order of probability. They have about, I think, 30 days to get back to the judge. And so they're going to try to get a new plea deal together, one that can pass muster with the judge. I expect that it absolutely cannot contain a provision for this, you know, global immunity. Also, the form in which they presented it, they worked in a whole

bunch other, you know, ways to weasel the system that the judge pointed out that, or rather technical, but what they basically mean is removing discretion for future Hunter-related activities. I expect they're negotiating very hard in trying to figure out a plea deal that they think can get as much of Hunter's liability away that the judge will accept. So they're trying to meet that sweet spot. But the whole purpose of them going to Delaware on Wednesday was to absolve Hunter from future prosecution. So now that that's out, what can they do? and this is where the other options come in. Understanding that this plea deal was essentially a pardoned through another means,

to put it simply, Joe Biden didn't have the political guts to take the he for pardoning his son. He promised everyone he wouldn't do it, and so what he had happened was DOJ work up this corrupt bargain, which was essentially a plea deal. So they could just drop the charges. DOJ has that discretion. Obviously, it would be a political wildfire. And then, you know, finally, Joe could just pardon Hunter. And a lot of people have been speculating about that.

Obviously, there's a lot of talk about whether Joe is physically capable of running, whether it's politically the right decision. Speculations out there that if he does do that, it could be a time for Joe to step aside. But regardless of what option there is that they do go with, we're on this. We sniffed out what was going on. We were there. We flagged it. We'll flag the next thing.

We'll continue to work closely to get this information out to make sure members of Congress have this information as they consider potentially. impeachment investigations. I mean, McCarthy said they were looking at an impeachment inquiry, which is a lesser thing. And so we're going to be fighting in the courts where the House has not been, frankly. I mean, Chairman Smith had personal lawyers represent his committee's interest, but the House as an institution was not there. And so we're going to fill that void. We build a team that is capable of doing this. And so we're going to run to the fire, and that's what the oversight project does. If you could pick maybe three things that the Biden

administration or Congress or the press don't want Americans paying attention to right now that we should be following and watching very closely. What would those be? One of a few top things. Yeah, great question. So the complete weaponization of federal law enforcement and the intelligence community is a big one because Americans have traditionally relied upon those institutions. And what they say goes, we take and their credibility has been damaged for the last couple decades. It's starting with a lot of the major lives about the Iraq war, major disclosures that have come out through various exposés. People don't trust the IC anymore and federal law enforcement. And seeing ever since Trump came down that golden escalator, the entire apparatus turned on the targeting of Trump, his associates,

and then anybody who supported a Make America Great Again agenda, the trust just isn't there. And so that is what the regime needs. They need us to trust their institutions that they've taken. over and confer on them legitimacy. And so you're seeing public trust in those institutions just, you know, go to the bottom of the barrel. And it's going to continue to go that way. And so that's the big high-level fight is the left and their media palace guards are going to try to prop up those institutions and everyone else has lost trust. And so we need to properly calibrate public trust to the trust that these institutions deserve, which is very little, and lay the path for

complete reform of them. And that's kind of the overarching objective. And that's also, the means by which they hold on to power and punish their enemies. And we're going to see that with, you know, more Trump indictments coming, more political prosecutions, et cetera. The second thing I would say is the election system. The whole January 6 episode is their way of saying no one can never question shady elections again. If you do that, you're a domestic terrorist, is their thinking. We haven't seen substantial improvements to the election system in the United States. This country is still going to be flooded with mail and ballots with little supervision, all sorts of electronic voting machines, etc. You can expect to see the same behaviors

and irregularities in the next election. The only difference is now the federal government has put in a basic legal framework to imprison you for questioning those things. They don't want us to question those things because it goes out their legitimacy, which is in the bottom of the barrel. So keep focused on the elections and don't just trust things just because someone with a dot-gov email address says it. The system was changed with this design and play that it would be. benefit the left, and that's, you know, what they're doing. Zuck Bucks in the last election has now been brought inside the federal government. It's called Biden Bucks.

They're doing the same thing. There's pumping money, targeting, get out the vote, getting as many mail-in ballots to people as possible with little supervision. And then the third thing, I would say, is the territorial sovereignty of the United States, which has been sacrificed on purpose by the Biden administration. When I think of some of the gravest constitutional abuses you can imagine in our country's history, what is potentially greater than giving up on purpose the safety and security of the United States by opening the border to achieve a political objective, flooding this country with likely Democratic voters? That's what they're doing.

And so when you think about the major scandals, like let's just think for a second about the Trump-Ukraine impeachment, which looks a lot differently now that we know there was actually a lot of underlying misconduct that Donald Trump wanted to expose. They accused him of sacrificing national security by holding up Ukraine aid for a political purpose. Okay, that's not what happened, but that was the accusation. Look what's happening at our border. That is giving up absolute national security for a political interest. And it's one of the greatest constitutional abuses I think this country's ever seen. It has massive impacts to every single American in this country, and all of them are bad. Thanks for breaking that down for us, Mike.

Congress is out for the next month, the month of August. What should we be looking for? What should we be watching? Because we know that, you know, they're not just sitting at home doing nothing. There's a lot of things that happen behind the scenes during the month of August. What are you watching? You know, it's very disappointing that they're going home. This was the plea deal getting thrown out and the disclosure of the FD 1023 document a couple weeks ago by Chuck Grassley that showed 17 phone calls that Biden was allegedly on or Hunter with the business interest in the foreign countries.

It was time to take the pedal to the medal. And this was the time the country, I think we're at large and liberal media were forced to confront what's actually. actually happening. And so now Congress is going to take a months long vacation. It's to me unfathomable. It's inexcusable. These people are elected to do what they said they would do, and that was to fight this corruption and conduct oversight, and they're taking a month-long vacation. So there will be a lot of staff work that happens. I expect some of the chairman will be engaged, but you're going to allow the left a month to flood the information zone with other stuff, and Congress is going to lose their biggest microphone and being here in D.C. in congressional hearing rooms and whatnot.

So it's just really unfortunate. It's fundamentally on serious in my view. The oversight project will not be taking in August recess. We will be here working, fighting, suing, discovering, getting information out. We'll just do it without Congress. What should we expect come the fall in September? So all the talk right now is on impeachment. Speaker McCarthy is doing a delicate dance right now where he said we'll do an impeachment inquiry, which is not impeachment, but it's basically developing the facts to support whether to do an impeachment. I think that is because the Republican caucus is deeply divided on this issue. That's the dirty little secret here in D.C. is that the Republican caucus is fundamentally out of step with the base of this country and the people who vote for them.

There's a lot of people that just will not under any circumstances vote for an impeachment no matter what the evidence is. And so when we get back, I expect that fight to be highlighted. there's going to be deep divides in D.C. here in our elected officials. I expect a lot of unity in the base in the Republican voters, but the party itself, we're going to see them out of step with the base. Mike, Director of the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation, Mike, thanks for being with us. Hey, thanks for having me on. And with that, that's going to do it for this Monday.

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