Norman Eisen writes:

We might have expected a fight from Hunter Biden and his lead trial counsel Abbe Lowell rather than news of Tuesday’s plea deal with the Justice Department. After all, Lowell did not become one of America’s most successful trial lawyers by pleading his clients out.

But the deal, negotiated by Biden’s lead criminal counsel Chris Clark, requiring Hunter Biden to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and to admit to felony gun possession, was a good one. That was true for Hunter Biden, his lawyers and prosecutors.

From the defense perspective, the charges for not paying taxes on time and for possessing a weapon while on drugs were not going to be the easiest to defend. In his 2021 memoir, Hunter Biden said he was abusing substances again in 2018, which raised suspicion that he possibly broke federal law when he purchased the gun.

Biden’s counsel has partly attributed these offenses to his client being in the depths of his substance abuse. But, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, many people who are tried and convicted are suffering from substance use disorders. So a plea deal minimizes Biden’s risk of incarceration and lets him close this dark chapter of his life.

Of course, it also does the same for his father, lifting a potential complication from President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. If his son and his legal team had chosen to fight, the case would have played out amid the 2024 presidential campaign and become an even bigger talking point for Joe Biden’s Republican rival. [Continue reading…]