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Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast with Kate Riga. You know, when we we generally do these podcasts pretty free form.

The way our kind of work process works is that Kate usually comes up with, you know, kind of two or three bullet points like, okay, we're going to talk about these things.

Right. And besides that, there's no script or anything like that. And you can probably tell by the way I talked that there's no script and there's no ums and stuff like that written down on some document.

But in any case, mood news changes quickly. And just as we were getting ready to press record, we got this news of this hiccup with the Hunter Biden plea deal.

And then we were we were on hold or kind of sidetracked for 15 or 20 minutes trying to try to figure out what was going on.

And we still haven't quite figured out what was going on. So, you know, because it's a sort of an unclear story, you probably listening to this a bit later, you're going to have a better sense of what happened than we did.

But it's just sort of an example of how we have to roll with the news as it as it unfolds. And the best I can understand here, you know, the the initial alerts were Hunter Biden plea deal falls apart judge rejects Hunter Biden plea deal.

Neither of those seem to be true. One of them could have been true, but was not because now they seem to have at least based on what we could pull together on the fly that they have finalized the plea deal.

The judge never rejected it. At least our current understanding, my current understanding is that the judge posed a hypothetical to both parties and that hypothetical was is is is Hunter Biden immunized from other potential crimes or not, not future crimes.

No one's no one's immunized from future crimes, but other things that might be investigated and she explicitly included as a hypothetical potential foreign representation of foreign governments.

And this has been kind of the hobby horse of Republicans that this is not you know that this was not covered.

And now and an additional wrinkle to this is that the judge is a Trump appointee, but appears to be a Trump appointee. And again, all of this is very provisional because we just kind of put this together on the fly.

Appears to be one of these Trump appointees where you'll come to where the parties will come to a deal kind of like all right, you want this one person and will will approve that person if you give us, you know, basically a democratic judge.

So the judge is a here is is a Trump appointee, but may not be a Trump appointee in the way that is not you know in the way we normally understand what what that means.

So in any case, the judge asked this and you know, is he is Hunter Biden immune for other crimes besides what we're talking about here and the prosecutor said no.

And the Biden lawyer said what the fuck you know deals off basically and we got into a whole conversation here with my with my co-host K Riga and actually our Joe Rogazzo is is is stepping in for Jackie Wilhelm our producer this week since Jackie is is away.

In any case we're trying to you know parse this figure it out and the way that you know the way that plea deals generally work is you have something the government is investigating you for and you make a deal and say that okay, I'm going to plead to this to this thing and that's it for this investigation.

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