Former federal prosecutor Francey Hakes and former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama Jay Town told Newsmax on Thursday that the immunity clause in Hunter Biden's diversion agreement was deliberately hidden in paragraph 15 of the document.
"I've been in hundreds of plea hearings in my career, and I have never seen one go like this," Hakes said during an appearance on Newsmax's "The Record with Greta Van Susteren."
"Here you had a judge going through very different documents. You had the plea agreement and you had the diversion agreement. The diversion agreement had a paragraph mysteriously — paragraph 15 — that the judge didn't get until right before the hearing, which is curious and should have raised her alarm bells and apparently did.
"That paragraph in the diversion agreement was an immunity clause, Greta, but it referred back to the plea agreements' factual allegations," she continued. "So what it did, in a very circuitous way, was promise not to prosecute Hunter Biden for anything that's in the factual statement in the plea agreement, which is basically any of his potentially criminal conduct over a period of about five years.
"So it was blanket immunity, and yet, the prosecutor kept saying that they were still investigating. And so the judge just could not figure out what was actually going on."
Town agreed that the immunity clause was deliberately concealed and said that the plea deal fell apart when Hunter Biden pointed to the promise of immunity in the diversion agreement.
"This was absolutely intentional by the U.S. Attorney's office in Delaware to hide that immunity clause in not only a diversion agreement that's not approved by the court or by the judge, but also it typically doesn't become public," he said. "It only became public because, during the allocution phase, Hunter Biden said, 'Well, there is this promise of immunity in the diversion agreement, so, other than that, I don't have any other promises to induce my plea.'
"That was the only reference in the plea agreement to the diversion agreement and that's where this thing really blew up. The judge, like you said, did a great job fashioning that out."
The former U.S. attorney also said that there was a reason the statement of fact in the plea agreement was so comprehensive.
"The U.S. Attorney's office, in their statement of fact, it didn't have to be the long colloquy that it was, that integrated all of his business deals with CEFC and Burisma and all of these things," he said. "It could just say he owed tax in 2017 and didn't pay them. But instead it really tried to include all of this double jeopardy, all of this behavior that he would be immune from, because they knew what was in the diversion agreement."
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