President Biden’s son left federal court Wednesday after his pre-arranged plea deal with the Justice Department (DOJ) fell apart after surprising revelations that Hunter Biden is still under investigation for possible Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) crimes. 

Hunter Biden was expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax as part of a plea deal to avoid jail time on a felony gun charge.

But Judge Maryellen Noreika did not accept the plea agreement, questioning its constitutionality and the broad immunity Hunter Biden would have received, leading Hunter Biden to plead ‘not guilty’ instead.

Criminal prosection experts say that the younger Biden went from ‘a sweetheart deal’ to a ‘real poison pill’ that could ‘expose him across the board.’

‘The judge had an obligation to make sure that the defendant and the government have a very clear idea of what is implicated guaranteed,’ Jonathan Turley, criminal law professor at George Washington University, told Fox News, adding that ‘they didn’t have that.’

Turley said the plea deal dissolving in such a manor is ‘extremely rare’ akin to ‘a wedding where both the groom and bride object.’

Hunter Biden, 53, has been under federal investigation since 2018. That investigation into his ‘tax affairs’ began amid the discovery of suspicious activity reports that related to money from ‘China and other foreign nations.’ IRS whistleblowers said the investigation began as an offshoot from an existing probe into a foreign pornography platform.

Hunter was expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay more than $1 million in federal income tax in exchange for immunity from other crimes.

He was also expected to enter into a pretrial diversion agreement for a separate felony charge of possession of a firearm – an element of which Noreika expressed questions of constitutionality.

Turley said the ‘sweetheart deal’ was an effort to ‘cap off’ the years-long federal probe into Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business dealings. ‘But now, it’s the worst possible situation for Hunter Biden,’ Turley said.

Turley said Biden ‘doesn’t have any protection at all’ and that the Department of Justice is in a position where they can bring to bear any or all of the remaining counts, including FARA.

‘And they usually do,’ Turley said. When a defendant ‘goes south’ on a plea deal, the DOJ usually ‘puts everything on the table for a potential trial.’

Jim Trusty, criminal prosecutor and former lawyer for former President Donald Trump, said the plea deal breakdown was unusual.

‘Up until today, Delaware was looking like the place where investigations go to die,’ Trusty told Fox News Digital.

But DOJ attorneys reiterated to the judge that there is an ‘ongoing investigation’ surrounding Hunter Biden.

At one point the judge asked DOJ prosecutor Leo Wise, ‘Is there an ongoing investigation here?’

Wise answered that ‘there is’ but said he couldn’t tell the judge what the investigation was into. When she asked if the government could potentially bring a FARA charge, Wise answered, ‘Yes.’

Scharf said that a likely next-step scenario is that a new plea deal will be put in place that will be limited to crimes within the jurisdiction of the District of Delaware, namely the tax crimes, gun and drug charges.

‘I think Hunter is just going to have to eat that and accept that he will continue to be under investigation for FARA,’ he said. 

‘Hunter is not out of the water. He is in a lot of trouble. And the situation is going to continue to develop. Today was, I think, in Hunter’s mind, supposed to be the end. And instead, he found out he’s really pretty close to the beginning,’ Scharf added.

Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman contributed to this report.

A top commander at the U.S. Army Garrison West Point has been suspended, officials said. 

The U.S. Military Academy’s Public Affairs Office confirmed the suspension of Col. Anthony Bianchi with Fox News Digital but did not provide further details.

‘U.S. Army Garrison West Point Commander has been suspended of his duties for alleged conduct pending the outcome of an investigation,’ it said in a statement. 

Bianchi, from Tampa, Florida, took command of the U.S. Army Garrison West Point last year. He was commissioned as a field artillery officer from West Point in 1997,’ according to his biography. 

He also played Army football. He deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan during his career. 

West Point recently drew attention from Capitol Hill when some Republicans demanded answers from the military academy over the school’s role-play exercise for cadets on ‘respecting the pronouns people prefer.’

Republican Reps. Michael Waltz of Florida and Jim Banks of Indiana sent a letter to West Point superintendent Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland regarding a leaked ‘facilitator guide’ for role-play exercises involving academy cadets.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) indirectly revealed Wednesday that President Biden’s son Hunter Biden is still under investigation for a potential violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

During a contentious court hearing in a federal court in Wilmington, Delaware, federal prosecutor Leo Wise confirmed to Judge Maryellen Noreika of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware that the DOJ is still investigating Hunter Biden over a potential FARA violation. According to the DOJ, a willful violation of FARA could result in a five-year imprisonment and $250,000 fine, or both.

‘Yes,’ Wise stated after Noreika asked him whether the government could bring a charge against Hunter Biden related to FARA.

Wise’s affirmative response sparked a disagreement between prosecutors and defense counsel which ultimately led to the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal. Chris Clark, an attorney representing Hunter Biden, remarked that the plea deal is ‘null and void.’

The hearing occurred Wednesday morning and was expected to be routine. 

Hunter Biden was expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax, as part of plea deal to avoid jail time on a felony gun charge. He was also expected to enter into a pretrial diversion agreement regarding the charge of possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance.

‘Something is rotten in the state of Delaware, and the judge sniffed it out today. We’re thrilled her reasoning tracked with the arguments we laid out in our brief to the Court,’ Mike Howell, the director of the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital.

‘Hunter Biden won’t be able to use this sweetheart plea deal as a get out of jail free card for any charges that may arise from the ongoing investigation into him,’ Howell added. ‘And that means that President Biden didn’t get a pass either.’ 

Republican lawmakers who are leading the congressional oversight investigation into the Biden family’s foreign business dealings similarly applauded Noreika’s questioning of the plea deal Wednesday. GOP leaders have loudly criticized the DOJ for putting the deal forward earlier this year after a multiyear investigation into the president’s son.

‘Today District Judge Noreika did the right thing by refusing to rubberstamp Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal. But let’s be clear: Hunter’s sweetheart plea deal belongs in the trash,’ House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said in a statement.

‘No one should be above the law,’ House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., added. ‘Even if your last name is Biden.’

Congress enacted FARA to minimize the impact of foreign propaganda in the United States. It requires ‘certain agents of foreign principals who are engaged in political activities or other activities specified under the statute’ to update the Justice Department on their activities periodically. They must also provide receipts and disbursements regarding the work.

Failure to do so can result in up to five years in prison and hefty fines. The New York Post reported that potential charges would have to come soon, given that it carries a five-year statute of limitations and Hunter Biden left the Ukrainian gas company Burisma’s board in 2019. They also noted that its most lucrative Chinese government-linked partnership occurred in 2017 and 2018.

The White House, meanwhile, has continued to say it respects the independence of the DOJ and that there has been no interference from the president on behalf of his son.

‘Hunter Biden is a private citizen, and this was a personal matter for him. As we have said, the president, the first lady — they love their son and they support him as he continues to rebuild his life,’ White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Wednesday. ‘This case was handled independently, as all of you know, by the Justice Department under the leadership of a prosecutor appointed by the former president, President Trump.’ 

The DOJ didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

The legal woes of Hunter Biden and today’s dropped plea deal likely accelerates the possibility of a formal impeachment inquiry by House Republicans.

Some Republicans were skeptical of launching any sort of inquiry – let alone impeaching the President.

But issues with the plea deal did nothing but pose more questions from Republicans. 

That’s why this likely spurs more serious conversation about impeachment inquiry.

This will be about the math.

The full House must vote to formally begin an impeachment inquiry. It’s fair to say that the House is a little closer to that now than it was before the Hunter Biden deal blew up. 

Moreover, voting to ESTABLISH an impeachment inquiry gives the House WIDE LATITUDE to go after more documents, information and conduct depositions. The Hunter Biden deal situation poses more questions than answers. So more Republicans may be inclined to pursue such a plan. 

Meantime, Democrats seem to be caught off guard by the change with Hunter Biden’s deal. They were prepared to just dismiss this and move on. But they can’t anymore. So far, Democrats have presented little cohesive strategy about how to deal with this turn events – and protect the president. 

We could hear more about this Thursday and Friday as this is the last time until mid-September that the House will be in town. 

Expect lawmakers to pepper House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) about the next steps. And also, pose questions to Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) about the defense Democrats may need to mount on behalf of the president.

The White House revealed Wednesday where it now stands on the possible existence of alien life, telling reporters they ‘don’t know’ whether the numerous sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) are proof whether extraterrestrials are real.

‘We don’t know. We don’t have the answers about what these phenomena are,’ National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told a reporter at the daily White House press briefing who asked if the U.S. government believed there ‘may be life outside of our planet.’

Kirby said he didn’t have a position on it ‘one way or the other’ that he could immediately speak to, but did say the government believed ‘there are unexplained aerial phenomena that have been sighted and reported by pilots, Navy and Air Force, that these phenomena have in some cases had an impact on our training ranges, on our pilots’ ability to fly, train, operate and stay ready.’ 

‘That alone makes it a national security issue worth looking at,’ he added. ‘Unidentified aerial phenomena doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it’s an honest assessment of what we think about this problem set. And so we’ll see where it goes.’

Earlier in the briefing, Kirby told another reporter that he had ‘no information’ to provide ‘one way or the other’ on the existence of a ‘UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program,’ but admitted the White House takes the issue of UAPs seriously.

‘There’s a whole office at the Pentagon that is stood up to analyze the data, collect reports, collate those reports and forward them up appropriately. And that’s, I think, testament to the fact that we know that in some cases these phenomena have impacted military training, have an impact on military readiness,’ he said.

The reporter pressed Kirby, asking whether President Biden felt claims of the existence of such a program warranted further investigation, and if the White House saw them as credible.

‘If the president didn’t believe that the sightings by pilots were serious enough to be considered, he wouldn’t have wanted the Pentagon to stand up an office to look at this, to analyze the data, to collect reports and provide a system by which we can collate the information and better figure out what we’ve got here,’ Kirby responded. 

‘But that work is ongoing. So if your question is do we think we need to be transparent with the American people, of course, we need to be as transparent as we can be. But the truth is… we don’t have hard and fast answers on these things. We are trying to get smarter on it,’ he added.

Kirby’s statements come on the same day that the House Oversight Committee held a hearing concerning the sightings of UAPs and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), which included testimony from whistleblower David Grusch, who testified under oath his life was threatened and that he was instructed to keep quiet about a secret government-run crashed UFO retrieval program. 

Another witness told members of the committee he believed ‘something is going on in our airspace.’

Fox News’ Chris Eberhart contributed to this report.

New York City plans to shelter up to 1,000 migrants in the parking lot of Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in Queens.The temporary facility will exclusively house adult men.‘New York City continues to receive thousands of asylum seekers each week, and we have stepped up and led the nation, but this national crisis should not fall on cities alone to navigate,’ Democratic Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement. ‘We need a national solution here.’

New York City will set up a shelter for up to 1,000 migrants in the parking lot of a state psychiatric hospital as thousands of asylum seekers continue to arrive in the city weekly, officials said Wednesday.

The new emergency relief center at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in the Queens borough of New York will house adult men who are asylum seekers and will offer services including meals and medical care, the officials said.

‘This center will provide not just a place to stay but also critical services to support these individuals on their journey,’ Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol said at a City Hall news conference.

New York state will provide the space at the 300-acre Creedmoor facility and will reimburse the city for setting the migrant center up and staffing it, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said.

There are currently more than 56,000 migrants in New York’s care, with more people arriving daily, officials said.

Mayor Eric Adams has scrambled to house migrants while asking for help from the federal government.

‘New York City continues to receive thousands of asylum seekers each week, and we have stepped up and led the nation, but this national crisis should not fall on cities alone to navigate. We need a national solution here,’ the mayor said in a statement.

Adams, a Democrat, announced last week that some adult asylum seekers without children in the city’s shelter system would be given 60 days notice to find other accommodations in order to make room for families with children. Dr. Ted Long, senior vice president of the city’s public hospital system, which oversees the migrant shelters, said Wednesday that about 100 migrants have been given notice so far.

Officials said the Creedmoor migrant center should be up and running at some point next month.

Over the past year, New York City has rented out hotels to house migrants, and has placed asylum seekers in locations including a cruise ship terminal and a former police academy building.

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Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was on the receiving end of another barrage from House Republicans on Wednesday as he faced the House Judiciary Committee and was quizzed about the administration’s efforts to tackle the border crisis.

‘I’ve been in Congress seven years. I think you’re the most dishonest witness that has ever appeared before the Judiciary Committee, and I think I speak for a lot of my colleagues,’ Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., said. ‘This is such a frustrating exercise for us because our constituents want answers.’

The fireworks came as part of a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the department, which has been at the center of the handling of the ongoing crisis at the southern border in its third year.

Mayorkas has become a lightning rod for the crisis, with Republicans blaming him for running ‘open border’ policies they say sparked and then fueled the border crisis, which saw over 1.7 million migrant encounters in fiscal 2021 and over 2.4 million in fiscal 2022.

Republicans say that the rollback of Trump-era policies, including border wall construction, the Remain-in-Mexico policy and others, along with a reduction of interior enforcement and expansion of catch-and-release, has led to the historic surge. House Republicans have accused Mayorkas of dereliction of duty, with some backing a potential impeachment.

Mayorkas and the agency have pushed back consistently against those claims, arguing his agency is working in a broken system in need of reform by Congress while dealing with a hemisphere-wide crisis. The agency has pointed to a sharp drop in encounters after the end of the Title 42 public health order.

While encounters are still high, with over 144,000 in June, they were the lowest numbers since February 2021. It has led to claims by DHS that its post-Title 42 strategy is working. The strategy includes a historic expansion of the use of humanitarian parole to allow migrants in legally at ports of entry while limiting the ability of migrants who enter illegally to claim asylum.

‘Our approach to managing the borders securely and humanely even within our fundamentally broken immigration system is working,’ Mayorkas said. ‘Unlawful entries between ports of entry along the southwest border have consistently decreased by more than half compared to the peak before the end of Title 42.

‘Under President Biden’s leadership, we have led the largest expansion of lawful, safe and orderly pathways for people to seek humanitarian relief under our laws. At the same time, imposing tougher consequences on those who instead resort to the ruthless smuggling organizations that prey on the most vulnerable.’

But Republicans are unconvinced and have accused the administration of abusing parole, which is defined by Congress as an authority to be used on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian purposes or for significant public benefit.

They have said the use of parole — which includes up to 1,450 a day at the border via the controversial CBP One app and a policy to fly in up to 30,000 a month from four countries — is illegal. 

Supporters of the use of parole by the administration have noted that multiple administrations have used it to grant relief on multiple occasions, including migrants fleeing Cuba and Vietnam and, most recently, ‘parole in place’ to prevent deportation of illegal immigrant family members of military veterans. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., noted it had been used as far back as the Eisenhower administration.

‘We have used our parole authority consistent with the law and consistent with past practices of different administrations,’ Mayorkas said.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., accused Mayorkas of orchestrating an ‘amnesty dance’ with the CBP One app, which allows migrants to come to the border and schedule appointments to be paroled into the U.S.

‘You’ve taken this app, and you’ve digitized illegal immigration. And you’ve scaled it to the moon,’ Gaetz said. ‘This app that you’ve got everybody downloading is like the Disney Fast Pass into the country, never to be subject to actual removal, just removal proceedings as you call them.’

‘I disagree with everything you said,’ Mayorkas responded.

Gaetz and Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, repeatedly grilled Mayorkas in an effort to get key data, including the number of migrants who have been released into the U.S. during the Biden administration and have now been removed.

‘Let me ask real quick: Can you get that number to us, like, tomorrow, or is it — you’ve got to go back and is it going to take weeks and months and haggling back and forth and all the letters we do? Congress writes letters to agencies, and we haggle back and forth, all that dance we have to do. Or can you just get us the number?’ Jordan said.

‘Mr. Chairman, we’ll provide that data to you as promptly as possible,’ Mayorkas responded.

Democrats generally praised Mayorkas for the work he is doing and attempted to push back against Republican talking points.

Ranking member Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., accused Republicans of pushing a ‘dangerous’ narrative of an invasion at the border.

‘The invasion narrative some members push in this hearing room is bigoted, fact-free and dangerous,’ Nadler said, tying the rhetoric to the 2019 El Paso, Texas, shooting.

‘We can draw a straight line from the hateful rhetoric we hear from some congressional Republicans to that horrific tragedy.’

He also slammed Republicans for ‘outlandish claims’ made at the hearings, particularly claims the border is open. 

‘The border is not open, and to say so is not only false but is really an insult to the brave men and women at Border Patrol who work every day to keep us safe,’ he said.

But a number of Republicans doubled down on accusing Mayorkas of pushing ‘open border policies’ and expressed anger at what they saw as Mayorkas not answering any of their questions.

Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., at one point exploded at Mayorkas for his alleged lack of responsiveness.

‘You’re not answering questions,’ Spartz said. ‘You’ve not answered any Republican questions. Is it something that your intent is not to respond to any questions from Republicans? You came with that intent?’

‘That is incorrect, Congresswoman,’ he responded.

The CEO of an artificial intelligence ‘safety and research company’ warned the Senate Tuesday that AI could be just a few years away from giving bad actors around the globe the capacity to carry out biological weapons attacks.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that the prospect of AI helping people develop and deliver these weapons is a medium-term risk that his company is grappling with today.

‘Over the last six months, Anthropic, in collaboration with world-class biosecurity experts, has conducted an intensive study on the potential for AI to contribute to the misuse of biology,’ he said.

‘Today, certain steps in bioweapons production involve knowledge that can’t be found on Google or in textbooks and requires a high level of specialized expertise — this being one of the things that currently keeps us safe from attacks,’ he added.

He said today’s AI tools can help fill in ‘some of these steps,’ though they can do this ‘incompletely and unreliably.’ But he said today’s AI is already showing these ‘nascent signs of danger,’ and said his company believes it will be much closer just a few years from now.

‘A straightforward extrapolation of today’s systems to those we expect to see in two to three years suggests a substantial risk that AI systems will be able to fill in all the missing pieces, enabling many more actors to carry out large-scale biological attacks,’ he said. ‘We believe this represents a grave threat to U.S. national security.’

Amodei added that Anthropic has briefed government officials on this assessment, ‘all of whom found the results disquieting.’

While his company supports the safe developing of AI, he said this dangerous risk posed by AI won’t go away because of corporate actions alone.

‘Private action is not enough,’ he said. ‘This risk and many others like it requires a systemic policy response.’

Amodei suggested three steps for the government to take, and outlined those steps in the Senate hearing that was aimed at sorting out the ‘principles’ of AI regulation. First, he said the government should take steps to put limits on the export of equipment that can help people develop AI systems.

‘The U.S. must secure the AI supply chain in order to maintain its lead while keeping these technologies out of the hands of bad actors,’ he said.

He also recommended a tough testing and auditing regime for all powerful, new AI models, and said those models shouldn’t be released to the public until they pass those tests. And third, he said more work needs to be done testing the systems used to audit AI tools.

‘It is not currently easy to detect all the bad behaviors an AI system is capable of without first broadly deploying it to users, which is what creates the risk,’ he said.

Amodei’s company is one of seven that agreed last week to a set of guidelines promoted by the White House that are aimed at developing safe, secure and trustworthy AI tools.

Amodei was at the White House last week as Biden announced the initiative, along with representatives from Amazon, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ripped what he called the ‘bad decisions’ coming out of the White House under President Biden, but stopped short of saying whether he thinks the president is fit to serve as commander in chief.

The discussion happened during an exclusive Fox News Town Hall on Tuesday after host Sean Hannity played a video montage of Biden’s frequent gaffes, and asked Kennedy if the president was ‘physically, mentally, cognitively strong enough to lead our country.’

‘Well, he’s never been very good with words,’ Kennedy responded as the audience laughed.

Hannity pressed Kennedy, noting the Democratic Party’s ‘reluctance’ to point out Biden’s gaffes, and asked again if he really thought Biden is ‘up to the job.’

‘I’m not reluctant to say that for partisan reasons. What I’ve tried to do during this campaign is avoid personal attacks on people,’ Kennedy said. ‘I will say, whether he’s up to it or not, whether he’s making his own decisions – the decisions that are coming out of the White House are bad decisions.’

Kennedy later repeated a claim he made earlier this month that he was ‘the first person censored by the Biden White House,’ referencing what he said was the White House entreating Twitter and Facebook to censor him within two days of Biden’s inauguration in January 2021.

He first made the claim in an interview with Fox News following federal judge Terry Doughty’s ruling that the FBI under the Biden administration ‘engaged in a massive effort to suppress disfavored conservative speech and blatantly ignored the First Amendment right to free speech.’

‘It seems that they’re also doing that [selective targeting] to any group now… to groups that are simply political enemies of the current administration or at least of the Biden administration. I was the first person censored by the Biden administration, according to Judge Doughty’s decision,’ Kennedy said at the time.

‘I’m still being censored. We know the FBI is involved in that censorship as well as a whole plethora of other federal agencies,’ he said.

Despite the allegations of censorship against the White House and other government institutions, Kennedy has remained reluctant to criticize the administration when it comes to the congressional investigations surrounding the Biden family finances.

On Sunday he told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that there needed to be ‘a real investigation,’ but avoided commenting in depth on the details of the investigation already revealed by House Republicans.

Fox News’ Charles Creitz contributed to this report.