Hunter Biden in court today as judge considers sanctions for his lawyers' alleged misconduct (video)

Okay, this is admittedly a strange story. Let’s start with Miranda Devine’s reporting:

Scandal in Delaware on eve of Hunter Biden plea deal. Judge Noreika has given Hunter’s lawyers to 9pm to explain why they should not be SANCTIONED for “misrepresentations to the Court... to improperly convince the Clerk's Office to remove [GOP lawyer] materials from the docket” pic.twitter.com/h7SpGTMQKs
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) July 25, 2023

We will make the important parts of that text more readable in a moment, but let’s give you some background, first.

As you might know, Robert Hunter Biden is currently scheduled for a plea bargain later today in U.S. District Court in Delaware.

In the process, Representative Jason Smith, Chair of the House Committee on Ways and Means wanted to file a brief as what is called an amicus curiae. It translates literally to mean ‘friend of the court,’ and it’s basically a way for people to come to the court and add some useful information and/or arguments. They are not technically parties. They are allegedly people who have some kind of expertise to add. This amicus was represented by Theodore A. Kittila of the law firm Halloran, Farkas and Kittila LLP.

And as a practical matter, it is often just a way of saying ‘this group is on this side of the case’—like Planned Parenthood or the ACLU announcing that they agree with one side or the other. Often there is more than a little vanity involved: ‘I’m a famous law professor. Surely, you have heard of me! Let me tell you, judge, how I think you should rule.’ Because it is currently under seal, we can’t read the brief but we could imagine it is vanity, or it could be a sincere effort to educate the judge on how terrible Biden’s behavior has been or how rotten this plea deal is. We will note that these kind of briefs are extremely rare in a criminal case, expecially when both sides have come to an agreement on a plea deal. On the other hand, this isn’t just any plea bargain and there are strong indications that Hunter Biden is not being treated as harshly as other Americans would be in the same situation, making one suspect that he is being treated differently because of who his father is.

But then somehow the entire document was removed from the docket. The official federal courts database, PACER, constantly informs people involved in a case by email when things happen on the docket. Everyone knew it happened pretty quickly.

Therefore, yesterday, counsel for the amicus, Mr. Kittila, wrote a letter to the court. He said that yesterday he filed for leave to file an amicus brief (you have to ask the court permission to file as an amicus). As is typical, he included a proposed brief to be filed, which is common practice. If leave to file is granted, then the court would automatically put the brief into the docket as its own entry and the court would give it whatever consideration the court thought it deserved (which might be none, anyway).

The brief included attached documents that included Biden’s tax ID number, i.e. his social security number. You are ordinarily required to redact that kind of information—lawyers are required to certify they understand that every time they log into PACER. After all, any member of the public can get an account on PACER that allows them to look at public documents. But, according to Mr. Kittila, those documents were already publicly available so there was no need for redaction—which is also a valid argument, if true. But Biden’s lawyers felt that it should be redacted—perhaps not realizing it is public information, or, perhaps disputing Mr. Kittila’s claim that the information is public.

According to Mr. Kittila, they were told by Biden’s lawyers that they would move to seal the documents. That is normal enough but Mr. Kittila’s allegation of what happened next is anything but normal:

Following this exchange, at approximately 1:30 p.m., we received word that our filing was removed from the docket. We promptly contacted the Clerk’s office, and we were advised that someone contacted the Court representing that they worked with my office and that they were asking the Court to remove this from the docket. We immediately advised that this was inaccurate. The Clerk’s Office responded that we would need to re-file. We have done so now.

So, he’s saying that someone called up the clerk’s office, pretended to work for his firm, and asked for the document to be removed from the docket. He also includes an email exchange with Biden’s counsel where they denied doing anything like that.

The letters between GOP lawyer Ted Kittila and Hunter Biden’s lawyer Chris Clark are quite something: “Someone from your side unilaterally contacted the Court and had our filing taken down.” pic.twitter.com/zhzstPsS24
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) July 26, 2023

This resulted in an oral order that you saw in that first Tweet. And while we won’t include every part of that oral order, here are some highlights (with extra carriage returns for clarity):

[T]he Court has reviewed the allegations in Mr. Kittila's letter regarding a call made to the Clerk's Office regarding the amicus materials….
Mr. Kittila asserts that an individual associated with the firm representing Defendant called the Clerk's Office pretending to be associated with Mr. Kittila and requesting the amicus materials be removed from the docket, which the Clerk's Office did. The response from Defendant's counsel on this issue was that ‘[a]s far as [he was] aware, the managing attorney from Latham called the clerk's office to note that personal tax information of the defendant had been filed in a non-reacted [sic] manner and to inquire regarding having the information sealed’ and that ‘the clerk took the filing down on their own accord.’ …
The Court has discussed the matter with the relevant individuals in the Clerk's Office and has been informed that the caller, Ms. Jessica Bengels, represented that she worked with Mr. Kittila and requested the amicus materials be taken down because they contained sensitive grand jury, taxpayer and social security information. It appears that the caller misrepresented her identity and who she worked for in an attempt to improperly convince the Clerk's Office to remove the amicus materials from the docket.

So, the judge is saying that she has looked into the matter and was told by people in the clerks’ office that, yes, a 'Jessica Bengels' did falsely claim she worked with Mr. Kittila and asked that the document be removed. So, in the part we are not quoting, Hunter’s lawyers were ordered to respond to ‘show cause’ why they shouldn’t be sanctioned by 9 p.m. last night.

(The judge also ordered that the filings be sealed, temporarily, to give the Biden team a chance to argue it should remain sealed forever.)

In any case, the Biden did respond on time. Matthew S. Salerno at Latham and Watkins provided a declaration from Ms. Bengels where basically she denied the whole thing and suggests a misunderstanding on the part of the clerks’ office. A declaration is a written statement made under oath and can support perjury charges if it is false. It is like an affidavit, except you don’t have to have it notarized by a notary public. She claims that her number often comes up on caller ID as ‘Latham’ and that she told the clerk that she worked for Latham, etc. when talking to the clerks. She claimed that all she was doing was asking about the procedure to get the document placed under seal. When they told her to file a motion to seal, she asked if there was any way to get it sealed immediately while they wrote the motion—after all, if the information was private, people were able to access it right now as they spoke. But she never suggested that she worked with Mr. Kittila. So, if they thought she worked with Mr. Kittila, she had no idea why and she suggests she was misunderstood.

Now, we will note that its not altogether clear who the judge spoke to among the clerks. Was it any person who spoke to Ms. Bengels? We tend to think the judge would not be satisfied on the topic until she spoke with that person, but we don’t know. So what we have is disputed facts, but we are not sure who is right or wrong. And we don’t know if that particular court records phone calls like this, either.

That gets us to the video we promised. We are presenting it now because there are small inaccuracies in it that you can recognize with all that background information:

A federal judge accused Hunter Biden’s legal team of serious misconduct in his criminal case.

They (allegedly) misrepresented to the court they were House Ways and Means Committee counsel.

To have damning IRS whistleblower evidence buried.

House must open impeachment inquiry. pic.twitter.com/xkO39c6lRY
— 🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 (@mrddmia) July 26, 2023

We are not sure how likely it is that this will have any effect at all on the plea bargain. We will note that the judge is a Trump appointee, so if you are concerned about pro-Biden corruption, that seems to be a minimal concern in this case. Still, judges really can’t force a prosecutor to go forward on a case if they don’t want to—that’s what made the behavior of the judge in Mike Flynn’s case so egregious. But it might be possible for the judge to continue this case until this issue is worked out.

More from Watters’ show:

Former asst FBI director, Chris Swecker, says this is a clear case for disbarment of Hunter’s attorney, after the lawyer called the judge’s clerk pretending to be someone else to get evidence struck from the record. pic.twitter.com/beHlNMtrSt
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) July 26, 2023

Hunter Biden's lawyer called the judge in his case pretending to be a lawyer for House Republicans to try and get the IRS whistleblower testimony against him taken down from an amicus brief in the case.

This has gone from a true crime to a sitcom.https://t.co/1p0cgRpmIx
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 26, 2023

I am a former federal prosecutor, and I literally cannot believe what just happened in Hunter Biden’s tax fraud case.

Based on what has been made public, here is what I think the story is:

The House Ways and Means Committee, led by Chairman @JasonSmithMO, filed documents… https://t.co/F5yYPU8kqL
— Will Scharf (@willscharf) July 26, 2023

The full tweet reads:

I am a former federal prosecutor, and I literally cannot believe what just happened in Hunter Biden’s tax fraud case.
Based on what has been made public, here is what I think the story is:
The House Ways and Means Committee, led by Chairman @JasonSmithMO, filed documents relating to their investigation of Hunter Biden’s criminal enterprise with the Court overseeing his tax fraud case, in which he is scheduled to plead guilty in a sweetheart deal tomorrow.
An attorney associated with Hunter Biden’s legal team contacted the court clerk’s office, falsely claimed to be part of the House Ways and Means legal team, and asked the clerk to pull the adverse filing for technical reasons.
The court figured out what happened, and is now demanding answers from Hunter’s team as to why they apparently lied to the court in what appears to be a desperate attempt to prevent evidence of his criminal enterprise from being put on the record in his tax fraud case.
This is not irregular; this is insane.

What is hard to understand is what Ms. Bengels would hope to accomplish if she did what she is accused of. As we said before, if you are a lawyer involved in the case, you are automatically alerted to any action by the court. So, let’s pretend that Ms. Bengels did falsely claim she worked with Mr. Kittila. She’s denying it, but let’s play pretend as a thought experiment. Surely, she would know that Mr. Kittila would find out what had happened immediately. And fixing it isn’t difficult for him. These days a lawyer in a case can just upload a document straight into a federal court’s docket (not including the Supreme Court) while sitting on his or her couch at home and in their pajamas. So, in this thought experiment, what would be the point of it? What would be the endgame? It seems unlikely to accomplish anything more than throwing a potential monkey wrench in their own client’s plea deal.

Or is it possible someone besides Ms. Bengels made the call?

There’s something missing from Latham & Watkins’ response: Hunter’s lawyer Chris Clark earlier wrote that the Latham “managing attorney” called the clerk’s office. So was paralegal Jessica Bengels the only Latham representative to call the clerk yesterday? https://t.co/yeSxXbF9N4 pic.twitter.com/QuwkTKuVs3
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) July 26, 2023

And she quickly offers a correction:

I should not have minimized Jessica Bengels’ credentials. L&W’s managing attorney Matt Salerno described her in his letter to the judge merely as an “administrative staff member” and “not a practising attorney”. But she is a qualified lawyer and a member in good standing of the…
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) July 26, 2023

That full tweet reads:

I should not have minimized Jessica Bengels’ credentials. L&W’s managing attorney Matt Salerno described her in his letter to the judge merely as an ‘administrative staff member’ and ‘not a practising attorney’. But she is a qualified lawyer and a member in good standing of the New York bar. It probably serves L&W to minimize her status to bolster the argument that it was a ‘misunderstanding’ or she misspoke or the court clerk misheard.
The real question, though, is why did L&W not make an application to the Judge if they thought privileged or private information was revealed in the filing.

She seems to be an attorney who specializes in the clerical end of things. This is what she says in her declaration:

I have worked at Latham & Watkins LLP for more than 18 years (since March 9, 2005). My current title at Latham is Director of Litigation Services, Litigation Services Counsel, and part of my role is to help attorneys comply with court and judges’ rules and e-filing protocol, with a focus on New York procedure.

And no, it is not accurate to say she is not a practicing attorney. Helping people comply with the law or court rules is the practice of law, even if she never stands in front of a jury.

There’s nothing wrong with her specializing in clerical work, but then that suggests she is not a ‘managing attorney’ as Chris Clark said in that email. So, did Mr. Clark misunderstand who called, or was there another person who called the clerk’s office who is not yet accounted for? That would slightly contradict the judge’s oral order that named Ms. Bengels, but it still isn’t impossible that there was another lawyer involved.

We’d be lying if we pretended to know the answer to all these questions.

The hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. today, at least for the plea bargain. We are unsure if things will get going at 10 a.m. sharp or not, but we will be keeping an eye on things to see if there is any more drama. And if you appreciate us keeping track of this sort of thing, how about considering a VIP membership with our offer below?

In any case, stay tuned.

***

Editor's Note: Do you enjoy Twitchy's conservative reporting taking on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth. Join Twitchy VIP and use the promo code SAVEAMERICA to get 40% off your VIP membership!

Hunter Biden in court today as judge considers sanctions for his lawyers' alleged misconduct (video)

Recommended

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Recommended

Trending on Twitchy Videos