House Republicans Make Last-Minute Play to Block Hunter Biden's 'Tainted' Plea Deal
A top House Republican has made a last-ditch effort to stop a federal judge from agreeing to a plea deal that would end Hunter Biden’s tax investigation.
Republican Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, filed a brief Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware, where a judge is set to decide on Wednesday if she will accept the plea deal negotiated by the U.S. Attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, according to The New York Times.
The deal would resolve pending tax and gun charges against Hunter Biden and result in no jail time.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers tried to stop the brief from being filed, according to the Times, then said it must be sealed because it contained confidential taxpayer information. Judge Maryellen Noreika agreed with the point.
“The situation here is not that the Justice Department exercised charging or plea negotiation discretion, but the presence of credible allegations that the investigation, charging decisions and plea negotiations were tainted by improper conduct at various levels of the government,” Theodore A. Kittila, the lawyer who filed the brief for Smith, wrote, a copy of the brief posted online said.
“Specifically, following the testimony of the Whistleblowers before the Committee, the Committee Member has been made aware that the Defendant appears to have benefited from political interference which calls into question the propriety of the investigation of the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” the filing stated.
“The Committee Member, as amicus curiae, maintains that, in the interest of full transparency and fairness for all citizens, it is critical for the Court to have this relevant information when evaluating the Plea Agreement,” the document stated.
“The Whistleblower Materials detail serious concerns about the handling of the investigation and prosecution of this case, leading to additional Congressional inquiries into the Whistleblowers’ allegations,” Smith wrote.
He wrote that those concerns include “ (1) whether the statute of limitations on key claims was intentionally allowed to expire; (2) whether various key officials interfered in the investigation, leading to the potential loss of evidence and testimony; and (3) whether the scope of prosecutorial authority was misrepresented to members of the investigative team, Congress, and the public at large.”
The filing noted that “Whistleblowers allege that prosecutors and Department of Justice officials caused unjustified delays and political interference that resulted, in part, in the statute of limitations expiring for charges related to tax years 2014 and 2015.”
Smith’s filing also repeated allegations that “Assistant U.S. Attorneys for the District of Delaware hampered the investigation tipping off the Defendant about aspects of the investigation … by prohibiting interviews of certain witnesses … “
The filing said these actions created “an atmosphere where investigative activities were held up by unnecessary approvals and constant slow-walking.”
The brief noted that its list of irregularities in the investigation was only the tip of the iceberg.
“These represent only some of the allegations presented to the Committee by the Whistleblowers, as they also provided numerous examples of unprecedented and unusual interference, delays, and roadblocks beyond what is described above, which appear to have hindered the investigation,” the filing stated.
“The Committee in its letter to Attorney General Garland and U.S. Attorney Weiss asked that this be submitted to the Court. … This information was not forwarded,” the filing said.
Christopher Clark, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, slammed the filing as “baseless and abusive,” according to the Times.
“Most troubling is that you have sought to append to a filing on the public docket hundreds of pages of documents, many of which contain grand jury secret information and confidential taxpayer information,” he wrote.
After the filing, Noreika threatened Hunter Biden’s attorneys with punishment amid claims a staff member “misrepresented…who she worked for” while demanding the filing be sealed.
Hunter Biden’s legal team called the incident an “unintentional miscommunication,” according to CNN.
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