Speaking of Fani Willis, they’re currently erecting crowd control barriers around the Fulton County courthouse. It’s not known if this is to keep the public out, or to corral all the defendants.
No movement on Jan 6 - the grand jury went home after an extended day. But…
In the documents case, a third co-conspirator has been charged with various forms of obstruction. Apparently it’s the dude who drained the pool into the server room but he also helped Nauta move the boxes.
Trump picked up an additional charge for willful retention of NDI and two more for obstruction relating to efforts to destroy evidence. So he’s now up to 74 felony charges…and counting.
De Oliveira - the newly added defendant - has a charge against him of making false statements to investigators. Dude literally said he “never saw nothing”.
Some amazing stuff in the superseding indictment. When they serialize this, it’s going to run longer than The Simpsons.
When people don’t respond to Limey, he responds to himself. Seek help for your TDS.
Some perspective on the Hunter Biden from Ken Pope, who having actually argued cases in federal court, sure as hell knows more about the law than I do:
The urge to comment on events immediately , as they are happening, before we have the information necessary to evaluate them, is corrosive. It’s also overpowering and pervasive in the era of social media. Nobody wants to wait for tomorrow’s morning paper, or even tonight’s newscast. We want answers and we want them now. Many of us also want to be the ones providing those answers — the first ones providing those answers — for those sweet clicks, comments, likes, and attention. Accuracy and nuance are the casualties.
Today Robert Hunter Biden’s long-anticipated guilty plea on two misdemeanor counts of failure to file a tax return was derailed. You’ve seen the news by now, and if you haven’t, you’ve probably seen the social media reactions, many of which are nonsensical and uninformed.
The truth is, so far, elusive. There were reporters in the courtroom. But, judging from the news stories, and with the greatest respect to those reporters, it seems they didn’t completely understand what was happening. They couldn’t report many verbatim quotes (they should have brought someone who takes shorthand) and federal courts don’t allow broadcast or media recoding of proceedings. So we’re left with a series of impressions by reporters who picked up bits and pieces of what was happening. Many of those reporters are intelligent and sophisticated but it’s not clear they have the experience with federal criminal law to pick up exactly what was going on.
The truth further eludes us because we lack the most important document — the written plea agreement between the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Always read the plea agreement to understand a plea. I argued weeks ago, when news of the plea deal came out, that until we got the plea agreement we could not fully evaluate the many claims that Hunter Biden was getting a “sweetheart deal.” In many federal districts it would be filed as a matter of course before the plea hearing, the government said in an earlier filing that it would be filed, and it still hasn’t been filed, leaving crucial questions unanswered and making it very difficult to interpret today’s events.
Here’s what we know, and what we still need to know.
We know that Hunter Biden showed up in court to enter his guilty plea. A federal guilty plea is an involved process; it’s routine for it to last anywhere from fifteen minutes (very fast) to an hour (slow). It involves a searching inquiry by the judge into whether the defendant understands the terms of the deal, the rights they are giving up, the sentence and sentencing process they are facing, the facts supporting the plea, and the voluntariness of the deal. Today that process went sideways, as it sometimes does.
From press reports, it appears that U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika asked questions about the scope of the deal. Specifically, she asked whether the government was agreeing not to prosecute Hunter Biden further just on these tax issues, or on any other issues it was investigating, including the Foreign Agent Registration Act. The government responded that the deal only precluded the government from prosecuting any other tax crimes related to these facts; Hunter Biden’s lawyers said that was wrong and if that was the case there was no deal. The judge told them to go talk and work it out. Apparently they did - and Hunter Biden agreed with the government that he was only protected from further tax prosecution on these facts, not from other prosecutions based on other investigations — but the judge asked the parties to submit briefs clarifying the scope of the non-prosecution promise and to come back, and did not accept the plea.
This is strange, and we can’t interpret the extent of the strangeness because we don’t have the written plea agreement.
Federal plea agreements typically spell out, very explicitly, the government’s non-prosecution promises. A standard agreement will say that the government agrees that this specific U.S. Attorney’s Office will not prosecute the defendant further for the facts and circumstances described in the plea agreement, but that the deal doesn’t cover any other crimes and doesn’t bind any other office or entity. That’s very narrow. It’s also very explicit and not subject to easy misunderstanding.
So for things to go wrong here, one of the following had to happen:
- The government didn’t define the scope of its promise of non-prosecution in the agreement. That would be a huge mistake and very unusual.
- The government defined the scope of its non-prosecution promise in the plea agreement but the scope was vague or badly drafted. That’s unusual and also a mistake. They are normally extremely careful with this language. The fact that the judge saw fit to inquire about the scope of the deal makes this possibility plausible — if the plea agreement was as clear on this point as it should be, and the judge read it, the judge wouldn’t have to ask that question.
- Hunter Biden’s lawyers didn’t read the plea agreement carefully or didn’t understand the non-prosecution promise. Hunter Biden has experienced attorneys and that would be a huge and embarrassing blunder.
If I could read the plea agreement I could tell you which of these scenarios happened. But they haven’t filed the agreement and haven’t made it public, so we’re left to speculate.
The judge’s refusal to accept the deal for now was appropriate. If there’s no meeting of the minds — if the parties don’t agree on the terms of the deal — the judge shouldn’t accept the plea. Also, once uncertainty has been expressed on the record, it’s not that strange for the judge to say “go put it in writing and come back” rather than accepting their statement “ok we straightened it out now.” Federal judges are notoriously careful about the guilty plea colloquy. I would probably do the same about such a high-profile case — if there was any hint that a party thought the written plea agreement was ambiguous, I would want it fixed.
What this does not seem to suggest, at least based on the information we have, is that the judge has accepted GOP arguments that Hunter Biden is getting a sweetheart deal, or that she’s part of a GOP conspiracy, or that she’s ultimately going to tank the deal.
We may have to wait until the parties file the clarification requested by the judge. One would hope they’d file the plea agreement — amended or not — by then. That will answer questions about this hiccup (and, I think, make it easier to evaluate the “sweetheart deal” arguments).
For now, the only thing I am confident in saying is that somebody done fucked up. But I’m not sure who.
3 Likes
When you get laughed at by Brett Baier, it’s really time to give it up.
Trump wants the judge to ok him committing more crimes while discussing his defense of his existing charges. You can’t make this shit up.
No one is allowed to view or discuss “SCIF-level” classified documents outside of a SCIF. No one.
Alito inadvertently provides the strongest argument yet for Congressional regulation of SCOTUS.
This is what happens with one branch of the Gov thinks that co-equal checks and balances envisioned by the founding fathers does not apply to them. Mind-numbing hubris.
3 Likes
Indictment Watch:
- Smith’s election interference grand jury is due to reconvene on Tuesday and Thursday this week, which could see them dropping indictments on Trump and others.
- We are now inside the window identified by Fani Willis where the courthouse should clear its calendar and have as many employees as possible work from home. They erected crowd control barriers last week.
- De Oliveira is scheduled to be arraigned at 10:30am (EDT) today.
- Smith previously sent a target letter to the employee at Mar-a-Lago who was in charge of the security cameras.
A judge has thrown out Trump’s motion to have Fani Willis disqualified and to quash the special grand jury report. This was the last procedural maneuver by Team Trump holding back indictments from Fulton Co.
The judge puts a deliciously snide remark in the footnotes:
You can’t claim you’re being harmed by something off which you are making money.
Biden is quietly vicious.
Wait until someone tells Tuberville which state he represents.
2 Likes
Because of course.
1 Like
The State GOP parties in key battleground states are broke.
If Republicans are disappointed with the results of the 2024 elections — for the fourth straight cycle, mind you — a key factor will be the replacement of competent, boring, regular state-party officials with quite exciting, blustering nutjobs.
Gee, I wonder where all that donation money is going?
1 Like
Jack Smith’s DC grand jury is in session.
Hopefully they are discussing a possible Verlander to the Astros deal.
I read yesterday or Sunday that his PAC had to ask for a significant refund of a donation it made to another PAC, something like $16m.