I was talking about David Weiss...the judge obviously can do what she wants when it comes to the plea deal.
NYT sounds surprised . . . the case had "seemed to have been sewn up just hours earlier." NYT hasn't been paying attention
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/07/who-is-judge-noreika.php 12 minutes ago Who Is Judge Noreika? by John Hinderaker JULY 26, 2023 Federal Judge Maryellen Noreika is suddenly in the spotlight. Today she refused to approve Hunter Biden’s plea agreement, as we have discussed in several previous posts. Liberals immediately denounced Judge Noreika as a Trump appointee. All of which raises the question: who is she? A useful source of information is the form she filled out when she was nominated to the federal bench in late 2017. This is a standard questionnaire that is responded to by all federal judicial nominees. It covers her education, her experience, and potential conflicts of interest, among other things. Noreika graduated from Lehigh University, got a masters degree in biology from Columbia, and her law degree, magna c*m laude, from Pittsburgh University, where she was a member of the Law Review. Her career in private practice was with the Morris, Nichols law firm in Wilmington, Delaware. Morris, Nichols is a good, medium-sized firm. She did intellectual property litigation, mostly patent lawsuits. Her list of significant cases is relatively impressive. She tried a good number of cases by today’s standards, some of which involved significant patent issues. Prior to becoming a judge, she had no experience with criminal law. Delaware is a small state, but because so many companies are incorporated there, its federal district court is an important venue and a good one for an ambitious litigator. Years ago, I had a very substantial case venued in that court, as do many lawyers from around the country. I infer from Noreika’s form that she is smart and a capable lawyer. With regard to conflicts of interest, Noreika disclosed that her brother, Keith Noreika, was then the Acting Comptroller of the Currency. Keith Noreika is a very accomplished man, a graduate of Wharton and Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Virginia law schools, and a partner in Simpson, Thatcher, a substantial Wall Street law firm. Perhaps most significantly, he was a member of the incoming Trump administration’s transition team at the Treasury Department. He is a recognized expert on banking and bank regulation, and a Republican. Wikipedia thinks that Maryellen Noreika is a Democrat, and that could be true, although I haven’t seen an explanation for that characterization. In any event, she was vetted and approved by Delaware’s two Democratic senators, a traditional part of the process of becoming a district court judge. My impression is that Judge Noreika is smart and confident. Unlike some judges these days, she didn’t get her first glimpse of a courtroom from the bench, and she is accustomed to high-stakes litigation. All of which suggests that she is a good person to preside over the Hunter Biden prosecution. Until now, that investigation and prosecution–real or faux–has taken place among Washington insiders, behind closed doors. No one seriously doubts that Hunter has gotten kid gloves treatment from the prosecutors. As events now begin to unroll within public view, my sense is that Maryellen Noreika is well above the average we might expect as a presiding judge.
Crackhead first son is not having a good day today. That smirk on his face when he’s entering the courthouse was replaced by a holy shiit look of terror when he’s leaving knowing that he could do some time in the slammer. Couldn’t happen to a nicer crackhead!
They don’t really have that much else to go after Biden. It’s hard to ignore that the economy is doing good. Many of them are showing up at ground breaking a funded by the infrastructure bills and even illegal Border crossings are down. It’s pretty much Hunter Biden, Biden is old and Wokeness.
also don't think that if it's too difficult to believe that if Trump is private-industry corrupt, Joe Biden similarly is public-industrial complex corrupt
At this point I just care about removing the guys that panders to fascists from politics. Later we can worry about a Bolshevik revolution to change the hiearchy. Don't worry. Biden family aren't going to keep their property either. So you can be rest assured justice will be done eventually.
Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal Wasn’t Supposed To Protect Him, It Was Supposed To Protect Joe https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/27/hunter-bidens-plea-deal-wasnt-supposed-to-protect-him-it-was-supposed-to-protect-joe/ excerpt: What to make of this? The most obvious explanation is that Hunter’s lawyers know what most Americans know: He was involved in complex foreign bribery schemes that implicate his father, President Biden. They were hoping to strike a plea agreement with the Justice Department that would protect him from future prosecution related to corrupt foreign business deals in Ukraine and China that involved trading on his family name, but once it became clear that the judge was not going to sign off on such an agreement, they backed out of the deal. Why would they want such a deal in the first place? Maybe because they know the Republicans in Congress continue to amass evidence that Joe Biden and his son took millions in bribe money from Ukrainian oligarchs for protection against prosecution. Hunter’s plea deal, in other words, wasn’t meant to shield Hunter from future prosecution, it was meant to protect Joe. A plea agreement granting Hunter broad immunity would make it harder to dig into his murky overseas business deals — deals which increasingly appear to have involved his father. more
Hunter Biden And The Fog Of War What We Don’t Know About Why The Hunter Biden Plea Deal Blew Up https://popehat.substack.com/p/hunter-biden-and-the-fog-of-war excerpt from the update: Updated later on July 26, 2023: We now have the plea agreement and diversion agreement and we now know more. Politico got copies — the plea agreement governing the plea to the misdemeanor tax charges and the separate diversion agreement on the gun charge. Politico has posted them here. Based on reading them I think this is a combination of my second and third possibilities discussed above — the government was sloppy and Biden’s lawyers didn’t read carefully. First, the plea agreement for the misdemeanors doesn’t have any non-prosecution language. That’s weird, and bad drafting. It means that the deal, the key bargain of the case about which charges he’ll be prosecuted for, isn’t fully contained in that agreement. It doesn’t and can’t stand on its own. That’s completely bizarre to me, because the plea agreement (as opposed to the diversion agreement) is the document governing how Hunter Biden is going to plead guilty to something, and it’s the place where you would expect that term of the agreement to be. Second, the diversion agreement — that is, the document that describes how if Hunter Biden stays clean for two years the government will dismiss the information charging him with being an addict in possession of a firearm — does have the non-prosecution agreement. Here it is: So the agreement says that the government won’t prosecute Hunter Biden for any federal crimes “encompassed” by the statements of fact attached to the plea agreement (about the tax crimes) or the diversion agreement (about the gun crime). But what does “encompassed by” mean? I think I know what the government thought it meant — they thought it meant crimes specifically described and called out in the statements of fact. But as Josh Barro, my podcast co-host on Serious Trouble, pointed out, the plea agreement also has some language about how Hunter Biden earned the income he didn’t report. That includes activities that are the subject of GOP accusations of misconduct, and that language refers to actions that might constitute crimes like failure to register as a foreign agent: So when the diversion agreement says that the government won’t prosecute crimes “encompassed by” that statement of facts, does that mean any crimes of which those activities are a part? It’s not clear. Friends and neighbors, that is shitty drafting. And if you’re Hunter Biden’s lawyer and telling your client that he can’t be prosecuted for crimes related to those income sources because of that language, that’s reckless advice and bad lawyering. It’s a failure by both attorneys. If Judge Noreika spotted that issue, called it out, and asked for an explanation, then good for her — she’s doing her job, which is to make sure the defendant understands the deal they are accepting. Another oddity: the agreement is between the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware and Hunter Biden. But the non-prosecution language specifies that the “United States” agrees not to prosecute him for other crimes “encompassed” in those factual statements. Is that intended to bind other districts as well? If so I would expect that to be far more explicit — because the District of Delaware doesn’t have the power to bind other districts. In fact, it’s very typical for federal plea agreements to specify, at length, that they don’t bind any other district or federal, state, or local prosecuting authority. If you think this is a pedantic issue, I invite you to remember the controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein plea agreement from Florida, which threatened to derail his New York prosecution until he thoughtfully killed himself. Let me call out one final odd feature of this deal structure. Again, the promise not to prosecute is kept in the diversion agreement, not the plea agreement. That means that if Hunter Biden breaches the diversion agreement by using drugs or alcohol — a relapse that is frighteningly common with addicts — that means that he can lose the protection of the non-prosecution agreement on everything, not just the gun charge. It means that he could get prosecuted for other tax crimes “encompassed” by the statement of facts on the plea agreement. The diversion agreement calls this out specifically: This seems exceptionally reckless for Hunter Biden, given the risks of an addict relapsing. Did Hunter Biden understand that if he relapsed he would lose the protection of any non-prosecution promise, and could be prosecuted for more tax crimes from the same time period? To sum up: this set of agreements is vaguely drafted. The government should have drafted them more carefully (for instance by making the non-prosecution language call out tax crimes specifically). Hunter Biden’s lawyers should have seen this as an issue and clarified it. It’s not clear to me why they structured it with the non-prosecution promise only in the diversion agreement; it makes the whole thing more vague. I blame all the lawyers involved. We’ll see what the parties say in the supplemental brief they agreed to file with the judge. Presumably now that they’ve been kicked in the ass over the issue they will make it unmistakably explicit. Second edit: A site that I would characterize as anti-Biden has posted what purports to be a transcript of today’s hearing. I would be surprised such a long transcript would be finished that fast but it’s possible. Assuming for the moment that it’s real (and it’s too elaborate and detailed for me to think it’s a hoax), it shows a combination of what I said above and other factors: the judge was put off by factors including the odd division of the matter into two separate agreements, the unclear relationship between the plea and diversion agreements, the unclear nature of what happens if she rejects one and accepts the other, the ambiguity of what happens to the plea agreement if the diversion agreement is breached, the ambiguity of what happens if the “addict in possession” law underlying the diversion agreement turns out to be unconstitutional, the fact that Biden’s attorneys and the government’s attorneys did not seem to have a meeting of the minds - at least beyond the hearing — what crimes are covered by the non-prosecution promise, whether the government stuck the non-prosecution promise in a separate agreement to prevent her from rejecting it (which she might have been able to do if it was in the plea agreement for complex statutory reasons), and the fact that the diversion agreement requires the judge to make the determination of whether Biden is in breach and therefore loses the benefit of the non-prosecution promise, which she was not comfortable doing and thought perhaps she shouldn’t do. I think she’s wrong on that last one, but everything else reflects a careful federal judge recognizing that a plea agreement structure is a complete train wreck that the parties did not carefully consider. This is embarrassing. Also, the transcript seems to show that the parties and the judge all think that the GOP filing attacking the plea is nonsense and the judge doesn’t care about it. more at the link
The same Freedom Caucus that coordinated election lies.... is also in charge of the Hunter investigation........ Credibility issue? Conservatives bearing false witness against their neighbors?!?!?! Democrats claim the GOP is withholding evidence contradicting claims in Hunter Biden probe @basso @Os Trigonum @AroundTheWorld
@Os Trigonum @StupidMoniker "Freedom Caucus" is exactly what I mean by how right wingers/libertarians just spam these terms but there is a vapid void behind these terms. They just know it sounds good. Stupid moniker, no matter how much you spew about "liberty" what you stand for and the things you defend and or attack don't match those terms.
