After a madcap “misunderstanding” involving Hunter Biden’s lawyers impersonating the Republican House Committee’s lawyers in a phone call to the court, Hunter’s plea deal experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly in the courtroom yesterday. The New York Times reported the story with the headline, “How Hunter Biden’s Judge Came to Have Doubts on the Deal.”

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Indeed. Now Judge Noreika’s even with the rest of us who already had “doubts on the deal.”

As it turned out, there was another misunderstanding, which became painfully obvious yesterday during the hearing to approve the carefully-negotiated plea deal. The Times’ sub-headline explained, “In just a few hours, Judge Maryellen Noreika exposed a gulf in understanding between the president’s son and prosecutors on an agreement they had spent weeks hashing out.”

Oh, sorry! It wasn’t a “misunderstanding.” It was a “gulf in understanding.”

The controversy centered on Hunter’s undeniable FARA violations. FARA is the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a process felony the Obama/Biden DOJ has been wielding against Republicans ever since Trump took office. For example, they prosecuted General Flynn under FARA for a single phone call. Similarly, the DOJ is pursuing Biden Bribery whistleblower Gal Luft over an alleged FARA violation, also for a single phone call.

Meanwhile, even people who live in Portland know Hunter has been hauling in millions from foreign actors, for years and years, not just with one phone call, but with many calls, meetups, tweets, handoffs, and WhatApps, and who knows what other unsanitary forms of communication, in exchange for explicit help getting the foreigners’ policies advanced in the U.S.

It’s not even in dispute.

According to corporate media, Hunter’s plea deal was supposedly always only about his income tax problem and his gun possession charge. But ever since the story broke, I’ve predicted it would somehow wind up with Hunter getting complete immunity for everything, including his much more serious FARA problems (especially serious in light of how assiduously the DOJ has been applying FARA to the eensiest contact between any Republican and a foreign citizen).

It was a three hour hearing. The simple version is that, while the judge was preparing to approve Hunter’s deal, she discovered — buried deeply in the fine print, so deeply it would have been trivially easy to miss — a lone citation to an odd statute number of a much broader type of release, a statute so broad and so universal that it is almost never ever used. As a result, the judge variously described the proposed Hunter plea deal as “not standard, not what I normally see,” possibly “unconstitutional,” without legal precedent, and maybe even “not worth the paper it is printed on.”

Since nobody could seem to agree, Judge Noreika asked the government to state on the record whether or not the single reference to the global release statute would give Hunter complete immunity from all possible crimes. She specifically mentions as an example any potential FARA violations. The Judge also asked the DOJ’s lawyers whether there were any ongoing investigations that might be affected by the release.

Curtly admitting only that “yes,” some kind of investigation continued, the DOJ lawyers explained the government did not intend for Hunter to get a complete release. They said their deal was only for a limited release as to just the tax issues and the gun charge.

That’s when the S.S. Hunter Biden capsized.

According to the Times, right after the government insisted FARA wasn’t included in the release — in spite of the way the deal had been written — Hunter (who should have let his lawyers talk) broke his silence, angrily snapping at the judge that he would never agree to a deal without broad immunity. Around the same time, his lawyer was jumping up and barking that the deal was now off, “null and void.” Hunter’s lawyer said the deal was not only for the tax and gun issues, but insisted the agreement was also for all other potential crimes related to Hunter’s financially-rewarding “consulting deals” with foreign companies in Ukraine, China and Romania.

A chaotic courtroom scene ensued, delighting the 30-odd reporters in the gallery, who’d been hoping for some kind of fireworks, but never dreamed of a courtroom field event like this. All the involved parties were upset. The DOJ lawyers were upset their sly trickery was exposed. Hunter and his lawyers were upset that they lost their sweetheart deal. And the Judge was upset that the DOJ and Hunter tried to fool her into making a giant error.

At the end of the day, Hunter formally withdrew his “guilty” plea and pleaded “not guilty” instead. Then Judge Noreika entered a sensational pretrial release agreement ordering Hunter to comply with a bunch of standards requirements like reporting international travel plans, avoiding drugs and alcohol, and getting a job. This is the kind of thing that can happen after the judge starts to hate you for impersonating the other side and involving the court in a fraud.

Still, it could have been worse. But not much worse. Hunter and the DOJ attorneys will now try to reboot the plea deal into something the Judge will accept. There’s no way they will ever try this case.