Glenn Greenwald: Hunter Biden’s Sweetheart Plea Deal Falls Apart, Dems & DHS Secretary Call for Domestic War on Terror, & Mitch McConnell Embodies Gerontocracy.

Tonight, a truly rare event took place at the federal courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware. The judge presiding over Hunter Biden's criminal case involving allegations of tax fraud and gun charges, Judge Maryellen Noreika, expressed significant doubt about whether the plea deal given to the president's son was fair and reasonable. Specifically, she questioned whether the plea bargain offered to Hunter Biden by the DOJ was excessively generous to Hunter Biden, the defendant. As a result, she gave the prosecutors and Hunter's lawyers two weeks to attempt to rewrite the plea deal in a way that was both clear and fair enough that she could confidently ratify it.

Judge Noreika seemed shocked by the extremely broad scope of the immunity that the plea deal would have bestowed on Hunter, specifically barring future prosecutions, prosecutions in other cases such as one investigating whether one Hunter failed to register as a foreign agent for paid work performed on behalf of foreign governments. When the two sides could not even agree on what the deal meant in terms of the scope of this immunity, the prosecutor suddenly declared that the immunity they gave to Hunter was very limited while Hunter's lawyers made clear that they had been led to believe it was very broad and Hunter's lawyers asserting that he would not plead guilty without this broad immunity for future prosecutions, the judge threatened to reject the deal entirely, which would mean there'd be no plea bargain agreement and the criminal case would continue, presumably to trial. So at least for now, the plea deal is on hold.

As the two IRS whistleblowers who worked for years on Hunter's case have been risking their careers to emphatically warn the public, the president's son seems to have been the beneficiary of very unusual interference on the part of sectors of the DOJ that were designed to protect him from more serious prosecutions, meaning to protect not only Hunter from the prospect of greater punishments for the crimes he committed but also protect his father from the risk of more revelations from additional criminal proceedings.