Hunter Biden received a sweetheart plea deal after being caught not paying his taxes for several years, but that deal was tossed out of court after the judge determined that Biden’s lawyers weren’t being completely honest. The deal is still on hold, but things aren’t looking good for the President’s son. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Hunter Biden’s received a sweetheart deal, a big sweetheart deal after being caught not paying his taxes for several years. But that deal was tossed out of the court after the judge determined that Biden’s lawyers weren’t being honest. Can you imagine? The deal is still on hold, but things aren’t looking good for the President’s son. Now, okay. I look at this like a lawyer. They went into court and they didn’t even have the boundaries of what they were agreeing to. The lawyers, and these are supposed to be, you know, this is supposed to be great lawyers representing this guy. They show up in the courtroom, the judge says, well, tell me about the deal. And he says, well, does this include future investigation? Does it include everything? Biden’s lawyer say, yeah. Yeah, it does. The prosecution says, hell no, it doesn’t. Can you imagine being the lawyer caught up in that where you look like such an idiot?
Farron Cousins: I mean, just, you know, from the, like, from a client’s perspective, you’re going in, you’re also thinking like, okay, good. My lawyer’s got this. They’ve handled it all. I’m covered for everything. Then you have to look, you didn’t know that I’m not protected from everything else? Like, I’m still under investigation, possibly for foreign influence pedaling?
Mike Papantonio: Look, talk about, we’ve done so many stories on FARA. It’s, we’ve talked about all the people that have gone to prison, right? Because of FARA. So, it’s a lot. It’s an easy, easy conviction. Okay. A FARA conviction is an easy conviction. Talk about it a little bit.
Farron Cousins: Well, so what we’re dealing with here, obviously when the plea agreement was announced, everybody said, oh, that’s too light for not paying taxes. But you and I had talked about like, well, wait a minute, isn’t something missing from this?
Mike Papantonio: From the beginning.
Farron Cousins:: Where is the possible influence peddling working for a foreign company with ties to the foreign government?
Mike Papantonio: His partner is going to prison because of it. Right?
Farron Cousins: Exactly. And so we had brought that up and now, now that this plea deal’s been thrown out, what is this, Vox finally mentioned too, like, well, wait a minute. He was never covered in this plea deal from the, you know, FARA violations. And so there could be more coming down the pipeline, which is why of course, you know, his lawyers and the prosecution met together for about an hour. And they came back to the judge, judge, we got a new deal. And the judge basically says, I don’t care. This, no, this is crap. I’m not doing this.
Mike Papantonio: Any federal judge would’ve done that. Any federal judge, when you got the defense saying, yeah, we’ve got a deal here. The prosecution says, I don’t think we got a deal. That is the most embarrassing thing that this criminal judge or this criminal lawyer could possibly experience. What does that do to his career? Do you go hire that guy? Okay. So, as we look at it, a lot of this turns on, it turns on the entire history of this case, doesn’t it? The history of this case is complicated. It goes all the way back to, what was the FD 10 23? That’s the whistleblower that made the accusation, that actually gave rise to the FARA claim. I mean, and other claims, but it gave rise to the FARA claim. Lesley Wolf, this female prosecutor that tried to run interference for, that’s the only way you can describe it. She absolutely ran interference for Biden. She would not even allow, she would not even allow that information to surface when the investigation was going on. So now you have Weiss, this is his, you know, this is his deal. Weiss has to make sense of all this and go back and start his investigation again. This has potential to go really bad for Biden. I think.
Farron Cousins: It really does. And based now what we know about his legal team, um, it’s not looking so good for you. I mean, he.
Mike Papantonio: I don’t think so.
Farron Cousins: Look, you know, you’re in the trial lawyer hall of fame. I’m willing to bet the guy’s representing Hunter Biden, they’re probably never gonna get there.
Mike Papantonio: I’ve not seen them in the trial hall of fame with me. I can put it like that. But they’ve got so much information, Farron, here’s where it gets ugly. They’ve got information of his contact with Ukraine, with China, and with Kazakhstan. So that’s what had Lesley Wolf, this woman who obviously has an agenda, had she not interfered with the investigation, you know, Weiss is taking all the heat right now. He’s the guy taking all the heat. But right now, Weiss better make sense of it. The DOJ better make sense of it. Or this judge, I just, just looking at this judge, this judge is not gonna give up on this issue. There’s gonna be a lot more digging going on. So I think this has potential to really, you know, if it plays itself out, if the Republicans win, oh my God, this guy’s going to the hoochie for a long time, isn’t he?
Farron Cousins: I think no matter what happens right now, things are gonna get worse for Hunter Biden before they get any better, on this particular issue here. Because there were a lot of stones, it seems weren’t quite overturned and now that prosecutor’s gotta go back and try to figure it out.
Mike Papantonio: And it’s a shame because it came down to this one woman that said, hey, I want to, I don’t want to do things right. I want to do things to favor Hunter Biden thinking she was gonna do him a favor. I’m sure that’s what it was. But Lesley Wolf has put him in a position right now that it’s untenable. It can’t get anything but worse right now. Farron, thanks for joining me.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week, but all of these segments are gonna be available throughout the next week. And make sure you follow us on Twitter @AmericasLawyer. I’m Mike Papantonio, and this has been America’s Lawyer, where we tell you the stories that corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers don’t allow for it. Their advertisers get mad when they tell some of the same kind of stories we tell, or their political connections don’t allow for it. They’re too Republican or they’re too Democrat, and therefore they’re so tribal they can’t tell the story. But we will. We’ll see you next time.
