A federal judge on Wednesday paused a proposed plea deal between Hunter Biden and the Justice Department that would have settled his tax and gun charges after confusion about the scope of the deal arose from both parties, The New York Times reports.
After nearly three hours of questioning either side about every detail of the agreement, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika sent them back to the drawing board to address her concerns regarding the deal's provision of broad immunity for Biden and requirement that she later determine whether Biden was meeting the terms related to his enrollment in a diversion program. "I cannot accept the plea agreement today," said Judge Noreika, a Trump appointee that was backed by two Democratic senators, adding that she would not be a "rubber stamp" after prosecutors and Biden believed they had a deal in place.
"DOJ and Hunter Biden were unwise and a little sloppy to combine the diversion on the gun/drug charge with the agreement on the misdemeanor tax charges," former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman wrote on Twitter. "They should have kept them entirely separate." During the Thursday edition of "CNN This Morning," former Assistant U.S. Attorney Elie Honig said that Noreika was "the only person in the courtroom yesterday who did her job properly," slamming Biden's legal team. "Clearly, they never had a direct conversation about this with prosecutors, which is not good practice by the defense," he said, adding, "A plea agreement is your future, and the judge has to do her job there and make sure there is not going to be a dispute down the line about what this means."
