Hunter Biden pleads not guilty to tax and gun charges amid uncertainty over previous plea agreement – live

The health of senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is back under scrutiny after an alarming moment during a Republican press conference this afternoon in which he abruptly stopped speaking and had to be led away.

Video of the incident was posted to Twitter by NBC congressional reporter Frank Thorp, who said the Kentucky senator, 81, “appeared to be unable to restart talking”.

McConnell was hospitalized in April after suffering concussion when he tripped and fell during a private dinner at a hotel in Washington DC. In 2019, he tripped and fell at his home in Kentucky, suffering a shoulder fracture.

Thorp said that McConnell was led off by his friend and colleague John Barrasso, Republican senator for Wyoming, and later returned to watch the conclusion of the press conference.

Asked what had happened, McConnell reportedly said: “I’m fine”.

The US Federal Reserve raised interest rates to a 22-year high on Wednesday as it continued its fight against rising inflation, my colleague Dominic Rushe writes.

The decision to increase rates by a quarter-percentage point to a range of 5.25% to 5.5% comes after the Fed paused its rate-rising cycle last month.

US inflation has now declined for 12 straight months and is currently running at an annual rate of 3%, down from over 9% in June last year. The Fed has raised rates from near zero in an attempt to cool the economy and bring prices down.

The US economy has remained robust despite the 11 rate rises the Fed has now implemented – its most aggressive rate-rising cycle in 40 years. Hiring has slowed but remains strong and the unemployment rate is still close to a record low.

Read the full report here:

The president’s son had been expected to formally agree with federal prosecutors on a resolution to two tax charges and one gun charge brought against him. Instead, he pleaded not guilty to the counts, after a judge raised issues with the deal.

Here’s the New York Times with an explanation of the surprise turn of events:

Judge Maryellen Noreika has delayed a decision on whether to accept the plea agreement between federal prosecutors and Hunter Biden — demanding that the two sides make changes in the deal clarifying her role and insert language that limits the broad immunity from prosecution offered to Biden on his business dealings. Biden’s lawyers estimated it would take about two weeks.

After a grueling three-hour hearing, Hunter Biden entered a plea of not guilty on the tax charges, which he will reverse if the two sides redo their agreement to the judge’s satisfaction.

Hunter Biden has pleaded not guilty to federal tax and gun charges, after a plea deal that was intended to resolve the allegations fell apart in court, Reuters reports.

The plea came after the federal judge presiding over the hearing in Wilmington, Delaware said she needed more time to evaluate the deal reached by the president’s son with prosecutors. Prior to the hearing, Biden had agreed to admit guilt to the tax charges, and avoid the gun charge as long as he satisfied certain conditions as part of the deal with the government.

Hunter Biden went to a federal courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware to formally accept an agreement with federal prosecutors, which was expected to resolve the long-running investigation into him. But amid questioning from a federal judge, the deal was revised to more narrowly cover the conduct of the president’s son, with a prosecutor making clear that he remains under investigation – a development Republicans, who are keen to prove corruption on the part of Joe Biden and his family, are sure to welcome. Back in Washington DC, GOP lawmakers are aggressively questioning homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who may soon be the target of an impeachment push, and while trying to determine if the US government has found evidence of aliens.

Here’s what else has happened so far today:

• Mayorkas defended his handling of the southern border from criticism by the GOP, saying his security strategy “is working”.

• Rudy Giuliani admitted that statements he made about two Georgia election workers alleging they perpetrated fraud in the 2020 election were false.

• At the last minute, a top House Republican tried to derail the plea agreement federal prosecutors reached with Hunter Biden.

Federal prosecutors and Hunter Biden have agreed on a revised plea agreement that will cover only certain conduct over a five-year period, CNN reports.

The changes came after the court hearing intended to resolve the long-running investigations of the president’s son was unexpectedly recessed after the judge questioned the deal’s terms.

Here are more details, from CNN:

Elsewhere in Washington DC today, a House subcommittee is holding a hearing that seems like it could resolve one of the most enduring myths about the US government: has it made contact with aliens or recovered crashed spacecraft?

No definitive answers have emerged yet from the hearing, which centers on testimony from a whistleblower who has alleged a government cover-up. The Guardian’s Leonie Chao-Fong is covering it live, and you can follow along here:

Hunter Biden is in federal court in Delaware to plead guilty to tax charges as part of a deal to avoid jail time, but the Washington Post reports that the hearing has unexpectedly paused after a judge questioned the terms of the agreement Joe Biden’s son reached with prosecutors.

From the Post’s report:

The hearing hit a snag when U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika pressed Biden about whether he would still plead guilty if it was possible additional charges might be filed against him in the future.

When Biden answered no, he would not, the judge ordered a break in the proceeding for the two sides to sort out whether his guilty plea would essentially immunize him from potential future tax or gun charges. At every plea deal hearing, a judge is responsible for ensuring a defendant understands both what they are admitting and what they are agreeing to as part of a guilty plea. It wasn’t immediately clear how significant a stumbling block the immunity question may pose to the plea.

Democratic representative Hank Johnson of Georgia asked Mayorkas about the kind of impact that white nationalist rhetoric of invasion and replacement has on minority communities, citing various attacks including the Tree of Life massacre and El Paso Walmart shooting.

“When an act of hate occurs, it’s not just the community that is impacted. The adverse impact is felt across of this nation, One of the most prominent terrorism-related threats that we face in [DHS] is what we term ‘domestic violent extremism,’” Mayorkas said.

“It’s white nationalist extremism, is it not?” Johnson interjected.

In response, Mayorkas said:

“There are diverse ideologies that underlie the acts of violence. White nationalism is one of them but we do not focus on the ideology itself. We focus on its connectivity to violence and our effort to prevent that violence. We see a diverse range of ideologies of hate, anti-government sentiments, personal grievances, false narratives [that] fuel acts of violence in this country. It is the connectivity to violence.”

Johnson went on to ask: “When elected officials repeat great replacement rhetoric, including the language of invasion, are they putting a target on the backs of immigrants and people of color?”

Mayorkas replied:

It certainly fuels the threat landscape that we encountered.”

“I’m not sure exactly what you do at the DHS other than great harm on your watch,” Louisiana Republican representative Mike Johnson told Mayorkas, before going on to ask him to define what misinformation is within the context of online censorship.

Johnson criticized DHS and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, saying that it was censoring American conservative speech online.

“What is disinformation? Who determines what’s inaccurate? Who determines what’s false? Do you understand the problem here? The reason the framers of our constitution did not create an exception for ‘false information’ from the first amendment is because they didn’t trust the government to determine what it is. And you have whole committees of people in your agency trying to determine what they… define as false or misinformation.”

Mayorkas pushed back and replied:

“That is not true. That is not what we do. We disclose the tactics that adverse nation states are utilizing to weaponize information.”

“No sir, no sir. That is not true,” responded Johnson, referring to a Louisiana federal court opinion on the Missouri vs Biden case which accused the Biden administration of censoring conservative free speech online.

“The court found specifically, it’s a finding of fact that is not disputed by the government defendants, the Biden administration, your agency, the FBI, or DHS, not in the litigation. They determined you and all of your cohorts made no distinction between domestic speech and foreign speech.

So don’t stand there and tell me under oath that you only focused on adversaries around the world and foreign actors,” Johnson added, his voice rising.