If you have been following the Hunter Biden legal case over the past thousand years or so, this weekend’s revelations should interest you.

Ed wrote about The New York Times’ story yesterday and his take is as always well worth a read. Politico dropped a separate, related story as well, and since their appearance, a lot of commentary from people involved has been floating around.

Both stories are based upon confidential correspondence between the prosecutors and Hunter Biden’s legal team, and I would speculate that they were leaked by Hunter’s team for their own reasons. Since the breakdown of the negotiations that led to the aborted plea deal Hunter’s legal team has been shaken up, his lawyer Abbe Lowell has been attacking US Attorney/now Special Prosecutor David Weiss, and new stories about the internal workings of the prosecution team have been coming out.

The most spectacular revelation of late is this: until the IRS agents blew the whistle David Weiss was going to drop all charges against Hunter Biden, letting him get off scot-free. Biden’s attorneys wanted an ironclad deal in writing to ensure no future prosecution, which eventually led to the current mess everybody has found themselves in.

Weiss was prepared to drop the matter entirely, but when the IRS whistleblowers came forward he decided he needed some face-saving plea from Biden. With such explosive charges on the table, he needed to at least give Hunter a haircut.

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.

That’s rich, although entirely on-brand. Biden should skate, and the people who reveal the corruption should go to jail. Very Biden.

As you can see US Attorney David Weiss was doing exactly what we all pretty much knew he was doing: finding a way to cover for Hunter Biden while covering his own butt. He was originally going to simply produce an agreement–one which would never have gone before a judge–to not prosecute Hunter if he remained a good boy for several years. The first draft of the deal as reported by Politico would have been essentially a get-out-of-jail-free card.

On May 18, another lawyer for Biden sent two Delaware prosecutors — including Lesley Wolf, a senior prosecutor in the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office — the first draft of a proposed deal, structured so it wouldn’t need a judge’s sign-off and wouldn’t require a guilty plea from Biden.

As part of the deal, Biden would admit he was late filing his taxes for 2017 and 2018, and that he owned a gun while he was using drugs. He would promise to pay any taxes he still owed, to pay his taxes on time for the next five years, and to never own a gun again. The deal would be made public, and it would also cover three corporate entities affiliated with him.

If he upheld his end of the bargain through January 2025, the Justice Department would promise not to prosecute him for anything they’d investigated thus far. The draft wording of that promise was clear and broad: “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.”

Weiss’ team of prosecutors seemed pleased. That evening, Wolf sent the Biden team a list of must-haves for a potential deal, noting that many of them were already in the first draft.

The New York Times story makes clear that Weiss was prepared to take this deal as-is until the IRS whistleblowers came out. It was his decision to require a face-saving “guilty” plea on misdemeanors that eventually blew everything up. Because with a plea a judge would be involved, and as we saw an attentive judge would notice immediately that the deal was corrupt.

Hunter Biden’s lawyers explicitly argued that the DOJ wouldn’t want to be at odds with their boss, Joe Biden, and therefore should cut a sweetheart deal for him… and so they did!… until a judge “asked a few simple questions.” h/t @woodruffbets @politico pic.twitter.com/E6NktS7Rpc

— Cliff Sims (@Cliff_Sims) August 20, 2023

Out of that need to save face for Weiss, who had been a good soldier for Biden and the DOJ, a disaster for all has come down. At least so far.

The bombshell in the Politico story is the hardball tactics used by the Hunter Biden legal team, which may have cowed Weiss into submission to the pressure from above: if Hunter were charged in the gun case they would call Joe Biden, President of the United States, to the stand. As was made clear, it would be “career suicide” for any prosecutor to do that.

AUSA Lesley Wolf had already pulled punches in the 2018-2021 investigation, and now in 2022 she was more than sympathetic to the arguments from Hunter's legal team, who she met with regularly without investigators. Clark told her charging Hunter would be "career suicide." /9 pic.twitter.com/QHItoXmkP8

— Tristan Leavitt (@tristanleavitt) August 20, 2023

In a sense, the story of the Hunter Biden case could be told as a tragedy, in which a US Attorney became fatally compromised by conflicts of interest and in which he is pushed around by forces much larger than himself. Weiss, as US Attorney for Delaware, was deeply connected to the Delaware political establishment (he had worked with Hunter’s brother Beau–a fact few knew or focused on) and had been recommended for the position by the Democrat establishment in the state. He was actually an acolyte of Obama and Biden:

Weiss worked with Joe Biden’s eldest son to hash out prosecution strategies. “We will continue to aggressively pursue all types of fraud in order to protect the public,” Weiss said in his part of a statement with Beau Biden on the fraud case.

Today, that little-known history highlights the deep challenges Weiss faces as he pursues a newly recharged investigation into Beau’s brother, Hunter Biden, in a small state long politically dominated by their father.

Although Democrats point to Weiss’s appointment by President Donald Trump as evidence of his independence, the full story of his career is more nuanced, as he spent two years as acting U.S. attorney under President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden and then remained as a top deputy for the remainder of their term.

During the investigation Weiss was under enormous pressure to delay the case–he did so while US Attorney under Trump–and let the statute of limitations run out on some of the most serious charges. Hunter’s lawyers kept on threatening him with confronting the President of the United States in Court. The Attorney General kept misrepresenting his powers. His colleagues stymied any chance of pursuing charges outside of Delaware, where many of the cases could not be tried.

And, in the end, he simply gave up any attempt to do anything. Until the IRS whistleblowers made it obvious that if he did nothing he would be revealed as corrupt.

Hence the deal. Except the judge’s questions about the deal forced it to blow up, and here we are.

By now it is clear that Weiss is utterly compromised. Whatever integrity he had at the beginning of this process–and in my experience US Attorneys tend to be great lawyers (if not always)–is now gone. Either he is utterly corrupted by the process or a broken man who just wants to get out of the process mostly whole. The fact that he threw in the towel is evidence enough that he is not the man for the job; the fact that he tried to fool a judge into approving a plea deal that was essentially a plenary pardon shows him to be a desperate, pathetic fool.

Did he think he was going to get it through? That few people attribute the judge’s reluctance to rubber stamp the deal to politics shows how weak the deal was–literally nobody could defend it but Biden’s lawyers.

Weiss may be on a mission to save his reputation, or may simply be hoping to delay until after the election and cut a deal with President Biden for a cushy job once the pressure is off. Who knows? He will never be a federal judge because no Republican will ever vote for him now. His once spotless reputation is now tarnished, likely beyond repair.

We all know Hunter is guilty. We all know he is getting special treatment. And now we all know Weiss is compromised.

These stories in Politico, Washington Post, and The New York Times are just the beginning. Whatever happens to Hunter–likely little–Weiss will likely never recover.