UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

...turns out GOP zealots just couldn't let him go...and turned that objectively 'sweet' deal into a very 'bitter one'...from the article...
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When one of Mr. Biden’s lawyers sent over the draft of the statement they intended to share with the news media, a top deputy to David C. Weiss, who had overseen the inquiry since 2018, asked to remove two words describing the status of the investigation, according to interviews and internal correspondence on the deal obtained by The New York Times. “Concluded” and “conclusion” should be replaced with the weaker “resolved,” the deputy said.

Six weeks later, the federal judge presiding over a hearing on the agreement would expose even deeper divisions and the deal imploded, prompting Mr. Weiss to seek appointment as special counsel with the freedom to expand the inquiry and bring new charges.

The deal’s collapse — chronicled in over 200 pages of confidential correspondence between Mr. Weiss’s office and Mr. Biden’s legal team, and interviews with those close to Mr. Biden, lawyers involved in the case and Justice Department officials — came after intense negotiations that started with the prospect that Mr. Biden would not be charged at all and now could end in his possible indictment and trial.

Earlier this year, The Times found, Mr. Weiss appeared willing to forgo any prosecution of Mr. Biden at all, and his office came close to agreeing to end the investigation without requiring a guilty plea on any charges. But the correspondence reveals that his position, relayed through his staff, changed in the spring, around the time a pair of I.R.S. officials on the case accused the Justice Department of hamstringing the investigation. Mr. Weiss suddenly demanded that Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses.

Now, the I.R.S. agents and their Republican allies say they believe the evidence they brought forward, at the precise time they did, played a role in influencing the outcome, a claim senior law enforcement officials dispute. While Mr. Biden’s legal team agrees that the I.R.S. agents affected the deal, his lawyers have contended to the Justice Department that by disclosing details about the investigation to Congress, they broke the law and should be prosecuted.
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Again I keep going back to the statistics referenced earlier regarding IRS choices on prosecutions for tax evasion...something on the order of 104 - 330 indictments...out of 200 million tax returns. What are the odds that Hunter Biden's case is more important than those involving ultra wealthy individuals or racketeers? Is what he did illegal?...YES...but should a federal indictment have been brought?...According to Weiss' initial review...NO. Then the politics of the matter revved up. That's my objective assessment. And let's not forget that Hunter paid back his obligations in full...including interest and penalties. The IRS got its "Pound of Flesh"


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/us/politics/inside-hunter-biden-plea-deal.html