Andrew McCarthy’s weekly NRO column elaborates on “The chicanery of the Hunter Biden plea deal.” I find that McCarthy’s columns provide analysis that is available nowhere else (and he is a natural teacher to boot). Unfortunately, however, NRO keeps his columns behind its paywall. It occurs to me that someone might want to contribute the funds necessary to liberate them. It would be a public service.

McCarthy’s column this week runs more than 3,000 words and is divided into five sections after an introductory warm-up. Each of the five sections has a separate heading:

Weiss Has Been Disappearing the Biden Case for Five Years

Probation Office Shoots Down Weiss’s Inexplicable Diversion of a Gun Felony

The section headings put me in mind of the sequence of section headings that translator Donald Frame supplied for Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond” in his translation of The Complete Essays:

Man’s Knowledge Cannot Make Him Happy

Man Has No Knowledge

I have wondered about the bilateral diversion agreement on the felony gun charge. If it takes two to tango on such a deal, they tangoed. What happened to it? McCarthy explains in the fifth section:

Hunter and his lawyers are trying to convince Judge Noreika that the diversion agreement and the broad immunity it promises are still valid and enforceable. In the end, he is going to lose, but not because Weiss has suddenly grown a backbone. Hunter will lose because, once again, the court rode to the rescue. It wasn’t the judge this time; it was the Delaware federal court’s chief probation officer, Margaret M. Bray.

While the judge need not sign off on a diversion agreement, the probation office must approve it if the agreement includes probationary conditions, as the one between Weiss and Hunter’s lawyers did. This is because the probation office is responsible for monitoring a defendant’s compliance with such conditions. Routinely, the probation office signs off on diversion agreements. Weiss and Hunter’s lawyers must have figured this one would be rubber-stamped as well. But Chief Probation Officer Bray declined.

How come? It is not a subject Weiss wants to dwell on, but we should. There is no explanation on the record. Yet, we know that Justice Department guidelines instruct that a defendant is ineligible for diversion if he is “accused of an offense involving brandishing or use of a firearm or other deadly weapon.” Hunter is known to have obtained a gun in October 2018 by lying on a required government form about his illegal-drug use. There is video from the laptop showing him brandishing a gun a few days later in a depraved and potentially dangerous scene with a prostitute. Not long after that, because of his carelessness, the gun he purchased after lying on the federal form was lost across the street from a school. (It was later recovered.)

As if that weren’t bad enough, I believe the probation office realized Hunter had to have been handling more than one gun on his autumn 2018 drug binge — and it’s not clear all guns have been accounted for. The gun he purchased after lying on the form is a revolver (described in the diversion agreement as a Colt Cobra 38-special revolver); but the gun in the video from a few days later is not a revolver (it appears to be a Glock). Note, moreover, that the diversion agreement called for Hunter to forfeit “all firearms . . . including but not limited to” the revolver. Implicitly, Weiss was acknowledging that there could be multiple guns at issue. Naturally, the Biden Justice Department doesn’t want to broadcast that fact: President Biden is as demagogic as Democrats get in demonizing law-abiding gun-owners and Second Amendment rights; his son’s felony possession of a single gun — that his Justice Department tried to give Hunter a pass on — is humiliating enough.

Judge Noreika exposed the shameful plea agreement, so now the misdemeanor charges have been dismissed. Chief Probation Officer Bray refused to be party to the appalling diversion agreement, so it too is sure to be scrapped. The commentariat is fantasizing that, with Attorney General Garland having now branded him a “special counsel,” David Weiss will turn alpha-prosecutor. I wouldn’t count on that. Weiss remains a top Biden Justice Department official, and he has methodically undermined the Biden case for years. It’s a better bet that he’s now huddling again with counsel for the president’s son, struggling to come up with more plea-bargain cosplay they can try to sell as real law enforcement.

McCarthy concludes: “Meanwhile, the statute-of-limitations clock keeps on ticking.” Although Hunter Biden’s lawyers are peeling off from his case, he probably doesn’t need them so long as David Weiss helms the prosecution (as Variety might put it).