Hunter Biden’s preliminary federal plea deal is bound to displease partisans on both sides, signifying that it is a fair and appropriate settlement for the protracted investigation into the president’s son.

The deal, revealed in court documents Tuesday, requires the youngster Biden to plead guilty to two misdemeanors stemming from failure to pay taxes owed for 2017 and 2018. The government is also suing to misdemeanor that Biden lied about his drug use when he acquired a gun in 2018. Rather than require him to plead guilty to that crime, the government agrees to drop the charges if Biden keeps his nose clean for two years under a practice known as prior diversion to the process.

Biden haters will attack the scheme like sweetheart, proving that the Justice Department is in the tank for President Biden. Chief Donald Trump has already accused the corrupt Biden DOJ of issuing a traffic ticket to Hunter Biden.

The charge is, of course, false: not only President Biden, but also Atty. General Merrick Garland kept his hands off the matter. Delaware US Att. David Weiss, a remnant of Trump, was allowed to stay in office precisely to close the case, even though new administrations usually appoint their own top prosecutors.

That settlement kept the matter at bay from the administration, but could warrant an objection from Biden’s defenders. As the late Judge Antonin Scalia once remarked about special prosecutors, Weiss’s presence exerted an almost irresistible pull to press charges of some kind against

Hunter

pray A dismissal of the case might have been plausible for a low profile defendant and a prosecutor appointed under standard procedure, but it was actually off the table from the moment Weiss was allowed to remain in office to oversee this case.

to pray

family

supporters could also note that while the charges in the proposed plea deal are bona fide, they’re not exactly the crimes of the century.

Hunter

Biden reportedly paid the more than $100,000 in taxes he allegedly failed to pay on time. That doesn’t excuse the crime, but it does set him apart from the typical tax defendant.

As for the crime rate, Biden apparently had the gun

in question

for less than two weeks before his girlfriend at the time threw it away. More importantly, as UCLA professor Adam Winkler has pointed out, the Justice Department rarely accuses anyone of lying about gun applications, especially false statements about drug use. When it does, it almost always involves a defendant who, unlike Biden, is suspected of using the weapon to commit a crime.

The charge may be even more questionable according to recent Second Amendment case law from the federal courts. Last year, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law that required a special reason for carrying a gun. And this month, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, which includes Delaware, ruled that a law in Pennsylvania prohibiting felons from owning guns is unconstitutional if applied to people convicted of nonviolent crimes.

The bottom line is that both sides had a lot to gain or lose in the Hunter Biden case, and that may have contributed to a sensible deal.

The proposed deal, which is subject to a judge’s approval, would allow Biden to avoid jail time and turn the page on an extremely dark chapter of his life. And it would allow Weiss and his department to secure a conviction and avoid a case with questionable prospects from having to go before a jury. Prosecuting a defendant who committed tax crimes during a period of drug addiction, and then turned his life around and paid the taxes, would be very loss-making.

None of this will stop Trump and his congressional supporters from screaming about the corruption of the Justice Department. We can only hope that it will be clear to many observers on both sides of the aisle that literally nothing the administration could do would elicit the same response. If the department were run by such wild opponents, it would be truly corrupt, just as Trump himself has promised it will be when he regains the reins.

Harry Litman is the host of the

Talking Feds podcast

.

@harrylitman