Prosecutors went after Hunter Biden aggressively on 'exceedingly rare' charges: former FBI official
Republicans' complaints that Hunter Biden's plea deal is too lenient are completely unfounded, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said on CNN Tuesday — on the contrary, he argued, if it were anyone else, charges would have been incredibly unlikely.
"You just heard Speaker McCarthy, Senator Scott, who is running for president," said anchor Erin Burnett. "Republicans are saying the plea deal is evidence of a weaponized Justice Department. Is it a sweetheart deal or not?"
"It's very hard to know without looking inside the case file and understanding what evidence the prosecutors and the investigators had to work with," said McCabe. "It's also really not fair to start making accusations until legitimate oversight has an opportunity to take place. Those are reasonable questions to ask to see if the prosecutors and DOJ exercise appropriate judgment based on what they had." However, he added, "I think what we can say pretty confidently is there have been many indications this five-year investigation hasn't really been going anywhere. It started with pretty lofty directives of looking at influence-peddling."
"They were looking at bribery, corruption and really, really serious corrupt, bad stuff," agreed Burnett.
"Right," said McCabe. "So if this is, in fact, the only charges that the government can prove against Hunter Biden at this point, that tells you the investigation didn't really go anywhere. I should add these charges are pretty rare. We don't typically see people getting charged criminally for taxes they have actually already paid even if paid late. Those cases do not play well in front of juries because juries ask, quite rightly, why are the prosecutors wasting time prosecuting someone who's already paid their tax bill."
"It's possible if there's a double standard, it's actually a standard against him, to treat him with more rigor," Burnett suggested.
"Entirely possible," concurred McCabe. "In fact, on the firearms charge, there's not too many hard scientifics on statistics on this, but in 2017 there were 478 referrals made about people who lied on the firearms form and less than 300 cases were filed out of 25 million gun sales. That's exceedingly rare. To be charged for that, if anything, they may have been leaning pretty far forward."
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