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From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

The collapse of Hunter Biden's plea bargain in federal court last week continues to

echo politically with new concerns about potential future charges, new questions about what Joe Biden knew and when he knew it and the first Democrat in Congress that we've heard speaking up critically about Hunter Biden's legal troubles. Welcome to Potomac Watch, the podcast to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.

I'm Paul Gigo here with my colleagues, Bill McGurne and Kim Strassel. Welcome to you both. They both been following the Hunter Biden saga closely. So the plea deal blew up last week under questioning by Judge Mary Ellen Noriecka, the deal specified to misdemeanor tax charges on a felony gun charge that was deferred under a diversion agreement if Hunter satisfied certain terms set by the deal.

Then the gun charge would be dropped, but the judge asked specifically if the plea deal exempted Hunter from being charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is commonly known as Farrah. Prosecutors said he could be prosecuted.

Hunter's lawyer said, wait a minute. No, we're understanding is he could not. And the deal fell apart from there. So Kim, tell us about Farrah and why it matters in this case.

Sure. So Farrah is this dusty musty old law from 1938, which essentially requires individuals who are acting as quote an agent of a foreign principle and quote to register with US government. It's essentially there to make sure that when people are lobbying on behalf of official state entities in another country that the government knows who's really behind their efforts.

The problem with the law is that it's very, very vague. In the 50 years leading up to 2016, the Department of Justice only brought seven criminal cases and only got three convictions.

What tended to happen and a lot of us have watched these roll out over the ages is that people might be confused about whether they should do it. They'd get a notification from DOJ.

They'd retroactively register under the law. And it was more that DOJ gave guidance, but special counsel Bob Mueller sought to his benefit to resurrect it with a vengeance when he was trying to get people to talk to him and go after folks involved with the kind of bogus Russian collusion investigation he was doing it.

He ended up being used against folks like Paul Manafort for work he done in Ukraine, Michael Flynn, both of these had obviously been advisors and workers in the Trump campaign, Michael Flynn for work he done for the Turkish government, even a democratic lawyer got snared in this great craig.

I was sort of hopeful that this would go away, but because of the precedent that he is set with this, this is now a live law, which is why you have people like the judge asking questions about whether hunter isn't also going to go down for it.

Right. So the Mueller investigation, Robert Mueller used this, it seemed pretty clear to me at the time in an attempt to squeeze Manafort and Flynn to be able to testify on any information they had about Russian collusion or anything else against Trump in the end, of course, they didn't have any information to squeeze out of them because there was no Russian collusion hard to squeeze something from that rock.

But Farah nonetheless was employed and it becomes a kind of leave it on the shelf until you need it sort of prosecutorial tool and ambiguity is something of a problem, but under the Mueller standard that he employed here bill, how vulnerable is Hunter Biden and I say that because we know he had business dealings with Chinese entities also he worked for barisma, which is the Ukrainian energy company he was paid by them.

So in that sense, he was an agent of those firms. And in the case of the CEFC China energy company, he set up a shell company, shell companies are often used to disguise ownership, you and I worked in Hong Kong, and I remember looking at the records in Hong Kong and you could have to sort through 20 shell companies, so how vulnerable is Hunter here?

I think he's very vulnerable as you point out by the Mueller standard, I mean, he admitted in court that he took money from these people and in one texture email, Hunter was very concerned about Farah, said he was taking these steps to be paid through a shell company to avoid having to register as foreign agent, so he well knew the problem.

True, it's a bad law is so broad, people say everyone in Washington would have to shut up shop if we're applied equally, but prosecutors admitted in court that Hunter is still vulnerable to those charges.

And in addition to legal woes for Joe, it's real problem, he was slapping around a foreign agent on Air Force 2 when he's going to some of the countries where Hunter had business, it's not a good look.

Kim, I guess the question is intent, one issue would be just how much he attempted to evade Farah, and I guess another question would be if these aren't government entities, but they're private companies.

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