Hank: NO MORE WoW!!!a day ago

From the NYTimes:

Douglas Berman, a professor of law at Ohio State University and a sentencing expert, read the court papers unsealed on Tuesday morning and said that it was difficult to assess from the filings whether Mr. Biden received a sweetheart deal.

The crimes to which Mr. Biden is pleading guilty, Mr. Berman said, are ones that the average person is rarely prosecuted for because they are usually only brought along with more serious offenses.

In Mr. Biden’s case, they include a charge stemming from lying about drug use on the government form used for his purchase of a handgun. Current and former officials say tens of thousands of Americans, out of the 25 million who buy guns each year, lie on their forms and are not prosecuted.

Prosecutors had pored over Mr. Biden’s finances, including examining two years of unpaid taxes. But in 2021, Mr. Biden paid the I.R.S. the full amount that his accountants estimated he owed, and paid off his liens.

By making the payments, former officials said, Mr. Biden complicated the ability of prosecutors to charge him with tax evasion because juries often question why the government has indicted someone who has paid his taxes. That left prosecutors with the options to charge Mr. Biden with filing his 2017 and 2018 taxes late — something that Mr. Biden’s lawyers argued to prosecutors are often handled without criminal charges and that in this case were handled as misdemeanors.

“If these are the only offenses, most prosecutors are going to say it’s not worth a federal case — they would say: Let’s not make a federal case of it for the average person because it’s not worth it to bring a case unless there’s reason to be concerned that there’s a public safety issue or the trust that everyone is treated equally under the law is at stake,” Mr. Berman said