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The Hunter Biden plea bargain with the Justice Department on tax evasion and gun charges has many Republicans shouting that he got off easy. But, as News Nation legal contributor Jesse Weber reasoned on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michel Riedel in the Morning program, Biden’s plea bargain fits the case within the context of the law and is not that surprising.
“What is surprising to people,” Weber explained to Berman and Riedel, “is why, after all five years, there was nothing more. There was talk of bribery, there was talk of money laundering, there was talk of conspiracy. Now, we have to remember that David Weiss, who was the lead prosecutor looking into this, was not a Biden guy, was not a Democrat. He was a Trump appointee. And so, the struggle, I think, for a lot of people is, well, if he really didn’t see any other kind of illegal conduct, a Trump-appointed lawyer, that’s maybe where it ends, and I think that’s going to be a hard reality for people.”
Weber says the stumbling block to the conspiracy claims is that Biden did, ultimately, pay taxes, and the law addressed this issue. “The thing that you have to remember with these charges is, he failed to file his tax return on time and didn’t pay the appropriate taxes, and sometimes that could be a civil penalty, and he ultimately did pay it back. There was no evidence, at least from what we’re seeing, that there was tax fraud… typically, in these cases, you wouldn’t see necessarily jail time. You would see them paying it back, you’d see some sort of deal, or you would see some sort of agreement.”
Ultimately, Weber says the charges Donald Trump is facing are the legal issue the GOP should be concerned about. “Obviously, they’re going to use this as a political football going into 2024, but I don’t know how much it’s ultimately going to help them, because I think the bigger situation is what’s happening with Trump, and that’s going to be a real problem… The charges that he’s facing in Florida, as I always said to you, were the more significant ones, and the ones that are really problematic for the former president.”
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