'Sweetheart deal': Hunter Biden's plea deal with DOJ over gun, taxes sparks immediate criticism

House Republicans and one of the country's top legal scholars said Tuesday after Hunter Biden's lawyer announced their client had reached a deal with the Justice Department over the agency's tax and gun investigation that the president's son had gotten off easy.

"Let's be clear: the Department of Justice’s charges against President Biden’s son Hunter reveal a two-tiered system of justice," said House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer. "Hunter Biden is getting away with a slap on the wrist."

The Kentucky Republican also says the deal comes as his panel reveals that Hunter Biden and his father, President Joe Biden, as vice president, "engaged in a pattern of corruption, influence peddling, and possibly bribery."

Comer also called the Biden agreement with federal prosecutors a "sweetheart deal." 

Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called the deal "pathetic" and said it protected the department's "puppet president."

She also was steadfast about the Biden family having engaged in questionable overseas business deals, "raking in tens of millions of dollars from foreign countries" because Joe Biden as the Obama administration's vice president was making policy decisions to be help his son's clients.

In the deal announced Tuesday, federal prosecutors charged the Hunter Biden with two misdemeanor tax charges, which he will plead guilty to, as well as a felony firearms possession as a drug user.

The latter charge will be dismissed pending a successful two-year probation.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said on Fox News that the plea deal has "all the makings of an avoidance of any jail time,"

"More importantly, it was an evasion of the more serious allegations facing Hunter Biden and the Biden family," he said.

Lawyer Mike Davis also criticized the plea as a "sweetheart deal."

"Hunter will get no jail time for being the bagman for Joe Biden’s vast foreign corruption," Davis tweeted.

"If you are the president's leading opponent," said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday, "the DOJ tries to literally put you in jail... if you are the president's son, you get a sweetheart deal." 

McCarthy added that the charges agaisnt Hunter Biden will "enhance" the GOP's ongoing investigation "because the DOJ should not be able to withold any information now."

House Oversight Chair James Comer, who's leading the investigations into the Biden family, said recently Republicans have had to "fight" with the FBI and DOJ after it had refused to turnover documents allegedly detailing Biden's involvement in a bribery scheme with a foreign national while serving as Vice President.