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“Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel [last] Friday in the Hunter Biden probe, a surprise move that intensifies the investigation into the president’s son ahead of the 2024 election. Garland noted the ‘extraordinary circumstances’ of the matter as he named David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware who had already been probing Hunter Biden’s financial dealings, as special counsel after plea deal talks in the case broke down.” AP News
Here’s our previous coverage of Hunter Biden and the Biden family finances. The Flip Side
The right is critical of the appointment, arguing that Weiss cannot be trusted to investigate impartially.
“When Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that he was appointing David Weiss as special counsel, he failed to mention § 600.3(c) of the Code of Federal Regulations entitled ‘Qualifications of the Special Counsel.’ These qualifications include the following: ‘The special counsel shall be selected from outside the United States government.’ (Emphasis added)…
“There are good reasons for this requirement. Special counsel is supposed to be independent of the current government, not an employee who serves as U.S. Attorney for Delaware and can be fired from that job by the president. He is supposed to look at the evidence through the eyes of an outsider…“Even if there were persuasive reasons for naming Weiss as special counsel, Garland had an obligation to explain his apparent violation of a binding regulation. He did not do so at his press briefing.”
Alan Dershowitz, Substack
“The absurdity of Mr. Garland’s announcement making David Weiss now a special counsel was all the greater because of the other ‘stage’ the probe had reached. This would be the stage where IRS collaborators publicly accused Mr. Weiss and his Justice Department overseers of violating normal procedures to go easier on Hunter than they would on any other alleged offender.”
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Wall Street Journal
“Multiple witnesses have told Congress that Weiss’s office refused to investigate the full extent of the Biden family’s overseas business operations and the income received from them. Several experienced, non-partisan IRS investigators (all of whom were later taken off the case by Garland’s Department of Justice) have said that Weiss’s top aide, Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf, explicitly told them their office would not pursue any investigative threads that might lead to President Biden. The IRS witnesses added that their investigation was repeatedly blocked. All that testimony was given under oath. Weiss’s office has not challenged it. “
Charles Lipson, Spectator World
“Here’s just a few of [the] things the money from Hunter’s adventures in business was used for: Upkeep on Joe’s sprawling Delaware mansion and grounds. A cellphone used by ‘JRB’ (what are the chances it’s anyone other than Joseph Robinette Biden?). Vacations and even tax payments, per a former Biden family biz associate. Plus, we’ve known since the discovery of Hunter’s laptop at a computer repair shop in Delaware that the first son had complained about having to give his father half of his income…
“The congressional probe has uncovered no direct evidence of foreign payments to Joe — yet. But Hunter said he was handing his dad big bucks, and already-uncovered records show at least nine members of the Biden family getting sent payments… House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is 100% right to demand that Joe himself hand over his bank statements. The American people can see the smoke, they need to see for themselves if there’s fire, too. If you’ve got nothing to hide, then draw a line under this once and for all. It’s on you, Joe.”
Editorial Board, New York Post
The left supports the appointment, and notes that Republicans had previously requested precisely this outcome.
The left supports the appointment, and notes that Republicans had previously requested precisely this outcome.
“[This] should encourage Americans that the process will be independent and transparent and, therefore, that it is more likely to be fair. Such assurances might not have been necessary at the beginning of the Justice Department’s Hunter Biden probe, but they became important after a plea agreement between Mr. Weiss and Mr. Biden’s attorneys fell apart under judicial scrutiny…
“Initially appearing reasonable, the deal turned out to include peculiar details suggesting critics might have been justified to suspect that Mr. Biden was being given special treatment… Meanwhile, two IRS whistleblowers claim they weren’t allowed to pursue their investigation into Mr. Biden because of political sensitivities…
“Special counsels should not be appointed lightly. They have tended to overspend and overreach. One temptation in the Hunter Biden case might be to investigate the president himself, as many of his critics wish. So far, the record suggests President Biden’s behavior was not spotless — but also not criminal. Nevertheless, Mr. Garland’s move was justified.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“In April of last year, more than ninety Republicans in the House of Representatives wrote to Garland and asked him to appoint a special counsel to investigate [Hunter] Biden… Five months later, more than thirty Republican senators, led by the Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, signed another letter to Garland. This one cited the existing federal investigation of Hunter Biden by David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Delaware, and called on Garland to ‘provide U.S. Attorney Weiss the full protections and authorities of a special counsel.’…
“This past Friday, Garland gave the Republicans what they wanted and elevated Weiss to the status of special counsel, saying that Weiss himself had requested this move and that it would be in the public interest. How did the Republican letter-writers respond to the news? Here are some of their statements: Senator Lindsey Graham: ‘This doesn’t pass the smell test.’ Representative Jim Banks: ‘What a joke.’… Eager to shift attention from the crimes and malfeasances of their own likely Presidential candidate, Republicans are more than happy to move the goalposts on the Hunter Biden case.”
John Cassidy, New Yorker
“We need a better system. To be sure, the prosecutors seem to be doing everything by the book. Yet the fact remains that, in a democracy, one candidate shouldn’t be able to prosecute another. And no one should ever be in the chain of command for the prosecution of their own child…
“There is a cure, one adopted by Congress after Richard Nixon ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox during Watergate: Congress can pass a law creating a genuinely independent counsel, one who cannot be fired by the president. This would create a legitimate distance between the president and the prosecutions and approximate the norm that exists in most countries. Such a law existed from 1978-1999… There’s no legal reason the law couldn’t be revived.”
Noah Feldman, Bloomberg
