Hunter Biden’s plea deal appears at risk of falling apart. What happens next?

The path of Hunter Biden’s criminal case took an unexpected turn on Wednesday when a judge appeared ready to toss out a plea deal the president’s son had reached with federal prosecutors over charges of unpaid taxes and lying on an application for a firearm.

Mr Biden was in court on Wednesday to enter a guilty plea had Judge Maryellen Noreika signed off on the agreement. Joe Biden’s adult son was set to admit guilt on the tax charges in exchange for probation, while he would also enter a pretrial diversionary program that would allow him to avoid a guilty plea on the gun charge.

It was a deal that Republicans had decried as an example of the kid-glove treatment that they argue the younger Biden has received for years; Hunter remains uncharged, as one example, for years of narcotics abuse for which there is a veritable mountain of accumulated photo and video evidence.

But whether that deal will ever become reality is now in question, as Judge Noreika questioned whether the deal would prohibit the federal government from prosecuting Mr Biden for other crimes in the future, and later took issue with a clause designating her as the arbiter of whether the president’s son had violated the terms of his agreement. She has ordered that clause to be modified or removed.

To be sure, the deal looks to be in a safer place now following Wednesday’s hearing than it did for brief moments during the proceedings themselves, but its implementation is far from a certainty.

So what happens next? On Wednesday, Mr Biden entered a plea of not guilty for all charges in the case, a move understood to be a formality as the intricacies of the deal are hammered out.

Should the deal be modified in a way that suits Judge Noreika, Mr Biden will then enter guilty pleas for the two tax charges while entering the pretrial program for the gun charge; his proceedings going forward would then likely be fairly uneventful, as would be the beginning of his probationary period.

The only potential fireworks remain in the possibility that the deal falls apart at the last minute, and Mr Biden decides to fight his case at trial. Such an outcome would be the worst possible news for the White House and his father, currently campaigning for re-election while his press team continues to refuse questions about the subject. A criminal trial of the president’s son during an election year would be a spectacle closely followed by Fox News and other conservative media, overshadowed only by the potential beginning of the criminal trial (or trials?) of Donald Trump next year.

Either way, expect to hear Hunter’s name a lot more going forward: regardless of the fate of his plea deal, Republicans are set to make his treatment by the Department of Justice a top issue throughout the Republican primary and 2024 general election. The party is still hung up on other unproven claims that the younger Biden conspired with his father as part of an overseas influence-trading scheme, not to mention the surreal and attention-grabbing images of the president’s son smoking crack behind the wheel of a speeding car and other evidence of his addiction-fueled lifestyle. Those issues will be cannon fodder for the GOP for months, particularly as Republicans try to out-manoeuvre and one-up each other in a crowded primary where standing out is everything.

What truly remains to be seen is how the White House and the president himself treat the issue going forward. Karine Jean-Pierre, Mr Biden’s press secretary, again declined to comment on the issue at her daily briefing on Wednesday. But it’s not likely that Mr Biden and his team will be able to maintain their silence on the issue throughout the campaign, particularly once debates begin in the summer of 2024.

One thing is clear: this is a big, ugly mess for the president at a very inconvenient moment.