With a hearing to approve Hunter Biden’s guilty plea just two weeks away, prosecutors at the Department of Justice and the federal judge in the case are coming under increasing pressure from GOP lawmakers to delay it until the United States attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, answers key questions about whether Mr. Biden fils received preferential treatment and whether Mr. Weiss was hindered from broadening his inquiry to include influence peddling and corruption involving the greater Biden family.Hunter Biden agreed on June 20 to plead guilty to two charges of “willful” tax evasion after a five-year investigation led by Mr. Weiss. Mr. Biden will also enter a pretrial “diversion” program for a charge of illegally obtaining a firearm that would allow him to avoid a felony conviction and stay out of prison.Yet all that could now be in jeopardy. On Sunday, Senator Grassley wrote to Mr. Weiss repeating his demands for information about how the plea deal came about and demanding that Mr. Weiss address concerns raised by two whistleblowers that the investigation was slow-walked and limited in scope by Mr. Weiss’s superiors in the DOJ.The plea deal could be further complicated by a lawsuit filed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The group’s Oversight Project has filed suit against the DOJ for allegedly failing to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request that would have allowed the public to review communications that mentioned the possibility of Mr. Weiss being appointed special counsel for the investigation into the first son. A whistleblower from the Internal Revenue Service who aided Mr. Weiss’s investigation, Gary Shapley, accused DOJ officials of hampering the Delaware prosecutor’s investigation, including denying him the status of special counsel, which would have afforded him more independence in making decisions without oversight from the nation’s capital. Mr. Shapley and another unnamed whistleblower have alleged that Mr. Weiss was hampered from broadening his inquiry into Mr. Biden’s tangled finances and into another whistleblower’s allegations of corruption and bribery involving President Biden when he was vice president.Mr. Weiss, for his part, has denied ever requesting special counsel status. In a letter to Senator Graham responding to the lawmaker’s queries, Mr. Weiss said Mr. Shapley’s characterization of events is inaccurate. “To clarify an apparent misperception and to avoid future confusion, I wish to make one point clear: in this case, I have not requested Special Counsel designation,” Mr. Weiss wrote Monday. He also stated that he has “never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.” The lawsuit seeking communications related to this issue aims to resolve any inconsistencies before the plea deal is finalized.“The records will lose utility if they are not produced in time for analysis and public dissemination prior to Hunter Biden’s July 26, 2023 plea hearing,” the Heritage Foundation lawsuit states, arguing that Congress, the federal court at Delaware, and the American people have the right to view these communications before a decision is made about Mr. Biden’s plea arrangement, which could result in little to no jail time. According to federal sentencing guidelines, someone convicted of the same charges to which Mr. Biden plans to plead guilty would face more than two years in prison as well as tens of thousands of dollars in fines. The director of Heritage’s Oversight Project, Mike Howell, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The presiding judge in this case, Maryellen Noreika, must approve or reject Mr. Biden’s deal during the hearing at Wilmington, Delaware, on July 26, should it not be delayed. Like Mr. Weiss, she was nominated to her position by Mr. Trump but was supported by Delaware’s two Democratic senators. She, like the Bidens, has deep ties to the Delaware legal establishment as a decades-long partner at one of the state’s most powerful law firms. Judges are given unilateral power in deciding whether to accept a defendant’s plea. A jurist has a wide range of options at his or her disposal when presented with such arrangements by prosecutors, including accepting the deal, rejecting it outright and forcing a trial or new agreement, or accepting the guilty plea while imposing different punishments than were prescribed by prosecutors. Judge Noreika — who is not nearly as conservative in her rulings as some other Trump-appointed jurists — was confirmed to her seat in 2018 by a voice vote in the Senate, meaning no members of the upper chamber objected to her commission. For 25 years before her ascension to the federal bench, Judge Noreika worked in private practice on issues such as patent law, biochemicals, and pharmaceuticals. Judges’ wide latitude in deciding the fate of plea agreements suffered a blow last year in a federal appellate court. In 2022, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that judges were only permitted to reject agreements on case-specific issues, such as proper charges being filed and sentences being issued. The case was borne out of a federal district plea agreement at Detroit in which a judge told both prosecutors and the defendant’s legal team that he would not accept any plea deal that included the defendant waiving his right to appeal his case following the plea. The panel of three appellate judges, in a unanimous opinion, ruled that the district judge had improperly involved himself in the plea negotiations and affirmed the practice that jurists only reject agreements for narrow reasons related to criminal statutes or sentencing discrepancies. In total, 90 percent of all federal criminal convictions are won via guilty pleas, according to a 2019 Pew Research study.
