Top GOP lawmakers are demanding answers from Attorney General Garland about Hunter Biden’s plea deal as three House committees launch a probe into the Department of Justice’s investigation of the first son and President Biden’s role in his business dealings.

This comes after the House Oversight Committee’s closed-door session on Monday with Mr. Biden fils’s former close friend, Devon Archer, who laid out in detail how the younger Mr. Biden used the lure of access to his father — even occasionally dialing the president into dinner meetings — to extract large payments from business entities in Ukraine and Communist China, among other countries. 

In a letter sent Monday, the chairmen of three powerful House committees asked the DOJ to turn over documents related to the plea deal Mr. Biden received in which he agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax evasion, avoiding the possibility of prison under a felony conviction. Congressmen James Comer, Jim Jordan, and Jason Smith — who lead the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means committees, respectively — wrote that the “atypical agreements” reached between the first son’s legal team and federal prosecutors have raised alarms that preferential treatment was involved. 

The deal was thrown out last week by a federal judge at Delaware after Mr. Biden’s lawyers and DOJ prosecutors could not agree if the deal would protect the first son from future criminal charges. The judge in the case, Maryellen Noreika, also questioned the constitutionality of the deal, which prosecutors admitted during the hearing was like none they’d ever seen before. 

The agreement, had it been implemented, would have required Mr. Biden to participate in a judicial “diversion” program in order to avoid a felony charge for having lied about his drug addiction in order to buy a gun. Judge Noreika objected to the unique, proposed arrangement in which her court was supposed to oversee Mr. Biden’s diversion program. 

Normally these programs, which are common for low-level drug offenders with no prior criminal records, are supervised by the local district attorney’s office. Offenders are tested regularly for drugs, often with no warning, and if they test positive can be charged with a felony. The unusual plea deal for Mr. Biden appears designed to shield him from these consequences. Mr. Biden, an alcoholic and cocaine addict who says he is now sober, has a long history of relapses and has been to inpatient rehab six times in the last 20 years.

The congressmen wrote in their letter to Mr. Garland that the plea deal “has placed upon itself the burden of getting the District Court’s permission to bring charges even though the District Court normally has no role in policing a pretrial diversion agreement in that manner.” Judge Noreika said at the plea hearing that she has no role in playing the “gatekeeper” of would-be criminal charges. 

The committee chairmen requested documents in their letter to Mr. Garland related to such pretrial diversion agreements. They asked Mr. Garland to produce records by August 14 from the past decade of how many of these agreements have been used by the DOJ nationally and how many of them included provisions that the defendant not be investigated or charged with unrelated crimes. 

They also asked the DOJ to produce the name of the person who first proposed such an immunity agreement, though prosecutors at the plea deal hearing made it clear they felt that Mr. Biden could still be charged with violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act for alleged influence peddling. 

Last week, the House Oversight Committee also wrote a letter to a top Biden political donor, Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, a Los Angeles real estate developer, demanding she produce documents related to her  purchase of the younger Mr. Biden’s artwork, as reported by Insider.

Archer said the younger Mr. Biden would include his father in meetings to make clear to potential partners that the Biden “brand” carried power in important circles. “Devon Archer’s testimony today confirms Joe Biden lied to the American people when he said he had no knowledge about his son’s business dealings and was not involved,” Mr. Comer wrote in a statement after Archer’s testimony had concluded. “Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ that his son sold around the world to enrich the Biden family.” 

Archer was convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud in 2018 and lost his appeal at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year. His legal team is in talks with federal prosecutors about when Archer will begin his one-year prison sentence.