Hunter Biden trial would mean president as witness, Hunter’s lawyers said in plea negotiations

Hunter Biden's attorneys said during plea deal negotiations with the Justice Department that if the first son were put on trial, President Joe Biden would be called to testify for the defense, new documents reveal.

Additionally, earlier this year U.S. attorney for Delaware David Weiss appeared willing to completely avoid prosecuting Hunter Biden for any crimes, documents obtained Saturday by The New York Times and Politico show.

Weiss nearly ended the investigation without requiring a guilty plea, but his office's position changed in the spring, coinciding with the time that IRS whistleblowers investigating Hunter Biden testified to House Republicans that the Justice Department interfered in their probe. Weiss suddenly urged Biden to plead guilty to the tax charges. 

Hunter Biden's attorney Chris Clark, who asked last week to withdraw from Hunter Biden's case over concerns that he would be called as a witness for the plea negotiations, wrote Oct. 31, 2022, in a memo to Weiss: "President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial."

Clark also said in the memo that a trial of the first son would create a constitutional and political conundrum by putting the president against his own Justice Department.

"This of all cases justifies neither the spectacle of a sitting President testifying at a criminal trial nor the potential for a resulting Constitutional crisis," Clark wrote.

Hunter Biden had expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and enter a pretrial diversion agreement on a felony firearms charge to avoid jail time, but the deal with the Justice Department collapsed after the judge overseeing the case questioned its constitutionality. 

A draft of the plea deal from Biden's attorneys would have protected the first son and three businesses associated with him so long as he admitted to the three alleged crimes, promised to pay any back taxes, paid his taxes on time for the next five years and never owned a gun again.

So long as Biden followed the bargain through January 2025, the Justice Department would promise to not prosecute him for anything they had investigated so far.

"The Department of Justice agrees not to criminally prosecute Robert Hunter Biden and the affiliated businesses (namely: Owasco P.C.; Owasco LLC; and Skaneateles LLC): (a) for any federal crimes arising from the conduct generally described in the attached Statement of Facts (Attachment A); or (b) for any other federal crimes relating to matters investigated by the United States," the draft stated.

Weiss' team seemed pleased with the proposal, and later that evening Delaware prosecutor Lesley Wolf sent Biden's attorneys a list of things that needed to be included in the deal while acknowledging that many of the proposals were already included in the draft.

The final deal from Wolf proposed earlier this summer included language that would have shielded Biden from charges in the future regarding his past conduct.

The case now may be headed to trial after Biden's attorneys said last week that prosecutors reneged on the plea deal.

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