From JC

Like most lawyers seeing this story, I can only say, “wow.” Yesterday, the UK Daily Mail ran the story with the headline, “Hunter Biden’s lawyers face SANCTIONS after being accused of lying to the clerk in his criminal tax case as judge orders First Son’s attorneys to explain themselves by tonight.”

Commercial-grade legal fireworks illuminated Hunter’s plea deal case yesterday. It began as the Court was considering whether to approve the sweetheart deal that the Biden DOJ proposed to clear Hunter’s criminal record. On Monday, House Republican Jason Smith filed a legal brief that suggested Judge Noreika should flush the proposed deal, due to claims of preferential law enforcement. The brief, filed on behalf of the House Ways and Means Committee, included lots of helpful data from the democrat IRS whistleblower who has been testifying to Congress over the last couple weeks.

Shortly after the Committee’s brief and its attached materials were filed, the Court abruptly took them down and sealed them from public view on the electronic docket. Through some miracle, the Committee’s lawyer noticed the document had been withdrawn and promptly called the Court clerk. The clerk said wait a minute, you guys just called us and told us to take it down because you filed it by mistake.

But they hadn’t. That’s when the fireworks started.

The Committee’s’ lawyer wrote a testy letter to Judge Noreika making the outrageous accusation that someone, probably Hunter’s lawyers, did the dirty, lied to the Court, impersonated them, and got the Court involved in a fraud by tricking the Court into deleting the Committee’s IRS whistleblower brief.

Hunters’ lawyers fired back, filing an equally-outraged response letter, first of all denying they would ever do something like that, how dare you, and then insisting that the Court punish the Committee’s lawyers for even suggesting such a thing. Imagine! The nerve.

Then the Committee’s lawyers found the court clerk who took the mystery call, and the clerk isn’t stupid. Clerk Samantha Grimes wrote them a succinct email laying out the facts, which were that someone named Jessica Bengels had called, said she worked with the Republican lawyer’s office (Theodore Kittila) and asked that the brief be immediately removed. The clerk even included Jessica’s phone number.

The phone number was from Hunter’s lawyers’ offices.

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That email resolved the battle of the letters and who’d made the call. Judge Noreika then issued a testy “order to show cause” why it shouldn’t sanction Hunter’s lawyers. An “order to show cause,” or “OSC”, is a type of order where the court says, hey, I’m about to do this thing here, and you’re probably not going to like it very much, so I’m giving you a last, short chance to talk me out of it. When potential “sanctions” are involved, especially sanctions for something like lying to the Court — which could reasonably result in eventual disbarment — an OSC is considered all-hands-on-deck, deadly serious, emergency type legal situation.

The Judge gave Hunter’s lawyers till 9pm last night to respond, and they filed a well-drafted, very thoughtful and courteous letter explaining that the whole thing had just been a giant misunderstanding. According to the letter, one of Hunter’s attorneys’ staffers — not a lawyer — noticed some of Hunter’s personal tax information in the Republicans’ brief and thought it should be taken down or something until it could be properly redacted.

Somehow, explained Hunter’s lawyers, the clerk got the wrong idea about who was calling. Not from anything they said.

In other words, the extremely carefully and well-written letter politely blamed the whole “misunderstanding” on the Court. In essence, Hunter’s lawyers accused Clerk Samantha Grimes of lying, or at least, being a silly, confused young lady.

Nor did Hunter’s lawyers apologize at all to the Committee’s lawyers, who they’d just finished unfairly accusing of lying, right before the clerk’s email cleared things up.

At the end of the day, I’m guessing that Hunter’s lawyers will get away with it, this time. They aren’t smart, but they are cunning. They pulled their trick this way knowing that it could blow up in their face, and so they had a non-lawyer make the call, and they put nothing incriminating in writing. So they have a bunch of plausible deniability, such as an unbelievable “misunderstanding” in a high-profile case unlike anything that has ever happened before in the Court’s history.

A cunning lawyer might get away with something like this to the point he evades sanctions, because at the end of the day the judge just doesn’t have enough evidence to drop the hammer. But — and this is a big but — the judge still isn’t very happy about things. I tell clients that a move like this often “poisons the well,” and puts the trickster sideways with the judge, who is just waiting for a chance to get them for something.

We’ll see how this works out for Hunter’s lawyers. Depending on what the clerk remembers from the call, they could get hammered.