https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/ ... nvictions/
The DOJ’s Undeserved Victory Lap over Hunter’s Convictions
by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, June 12, 2024
Remember, this prosecution took six years — and if Weiss and the Biden Justice Department had had their way, it wouldn’t have happened at all.
In the wake of Hunter Biden’s conviction on three slam-dunk felony firearm charges, we’ve now had a victory-lap press conference by so-called special counsel David Weiss, and the predictable chest-beating by Biden apologists about how the president’s Justice Department courageously prosecuted the president’s son without fear or favor.
Astonishing chutzpah, even from this crowd.
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The crimes found by the jury were committed on October 12, 2018, and were fully known to law enforcement within less than two weeks when the gun was recovered after the defendant’s then-girlfriend — the wife of his late brother, whom he’d also gotten hooked on crack — took the Colt Cobra .38, which he’d illegally purchased while lying on the required federal form, and recklessly discarded it in a trash bin near a school, out of fear that in his drug-addled state he’d hurt himself or others. If the defendant’s name had been Robert Hunter Smith, any normal federal prosecutor would have prosecuted him for these crimes by early 2019, if not sooner — and there’d have been no concerns about the Secret Service mysteriously intervening to make the damning evidence disappear.
But the defendant was named Robert Hunter Biden and the federal prosecutor was the abnormally political David Weiss, so the prosecution took six years — and if Weiss and the Biden Justice Department had had their way, it wouldn’t have happened at all.
David Weiss was appointed the Delaware U.S. attorney during the Trump years. I’d be stunned if Trump could pick him out of a lineup. In the state from which Joe Biden was a U.S. senator for three decades before becoming vice president, Weiss got the appointment only due to the recommendation of two Biden-allied Democratic senators. In the Trump years, Democratic senators blocked numerous presidential appointees. Weiss, by contrast, sailed through solely thanks to enthusiastic support from Democrats.
When President Biden took office, Weiss was the only Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who was not defrocked. By then, for over two years, Weiss had had Hunter Biden dead-to-rights on the gun case and on equally overwhelming evidence of tax offenses, yet he had taken no action. Indeed, as whistleblower agents have detailed, Weiss and his subordinates thwarted the efforts of investigators to move aggressively on the cases. Throughout that time frame, Biden AG Merrick Garland trumpeted Weiss’s status as a “Trump-appointee” as a convenient excuse to shrink from an action he was desperate to avoid but which DOJ regulations emphatically called for: appoint a special counsel with a reputation for competence and integrity, recruited from outside the government, who would take over the case in lieu of the hopelessly conflicted Biden Justice Department and its obeisant Delaware U.S. attorney.
During the first three years of the Biden administration, Weiss spent most of the time sitting on his hands as the statute of limitations chewed up the Biden investigation. Especially egregious was his willful failure to move on tax offenses (and potentially other offenses) based on Hunter’s peddling of his father’s political influence during the last years of the Obama administration, when the elder Biden was vice president (e.g., Hunter’s raking in millions from the corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, while dad pressured Kyiv to fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma). Because of Weiss, those crimes can no longer be prosecuted (which is why they are not in the tax indictment Weiss finally brought after his effort to tank the case entirely failed).
Much attention has been paid to the failed sweetheart plea deal on which Weiss colluded with Hunter Biden’s lawyers. That’s entirely appropriate, but it is easy to forget that Weiss tried to make the case go away with no charges at all. That became politically impossible once the whistleblower revelations about Biden Justice Department interference in the investigation became public.
It was only at that point that Weiss’s objective became the formulation of a plea bargain that would (a) make it look like the president’s son was being held accountable, (b) ensure that the president’s son faced no imprisonment on either the gun felonies or the evasion of tax on over $4 million in income (i.e., the evasion crimes still left after Weiss let the statute of limitations lapse on the earlier ones), and (c) concoct a vaguely worded, carefully hidden immunity term that would prevent Hunter from being prosecuted on any crimes arising out of the 2014–19 timeframe — covered in a “statement of facts” that was obviously written by Hunter’s lawyers rather than prosecutors. That last part of the scheme would enable Hunter to claim immunity from prosecution no matter what damning evidence was unearthed by the House committees investigating the Biden family business of international influence-peddling, regardless of whether a Republican administration took over the Justice Department in 2025.
Weiss’s attempt to give away the store was thwarted for two reasons. First, Judge Maryellen Noreika did her duty, asking a few rudimentary questions, particularly about the scope of the highly unusual, patently underhanded immunity term that Weiss’s team could not answer. Second, in a fit of pique, Biden’s lawyers pulled out of the agreement because Weiss — aware of the political stakes — would not acknowledge in open court that the intention of the deal was to give Biden a complete pass from any possibility of future prosecution, no matter what Weiss’s supposedly “continuing” investigation turned up. This was foolish on their part: If they had just rolled their eyes and agreed to Weiss’s politically minded claim that the agreement did not immunize Hunter from all future prosecution, then (a) the plea bargain would have succeeded, (b) Hunter would have gotten the benefit of no prosecution on the gun and slap-on-the-wrist treatment on the tax charges, (c) Weiss would never have charged Hunter with any other crime, and (d) the likelihood of prosecution in 2025 would have been low (non-existent if the president won reelection; and small even if a Republican won because the statute of limitations would have lapsed on all conduct that had ended by 2019).
The sweetheart deal gone awry was appalling. What happened next was mind-blowing.
For years, Garland had steadfastly refused to appoint a special counsel despite the patent conflict of interest plaguing any Biden Justice Department probe of the president’s son and other family members — activity in which the president himself was implicated. Even as he appointed a special counsel to investigate Trump (as to whom the Biden DOJ had no conflict), Garland parried every inquiry about why there was no special counsel for Hunter Biden. He laughably claimed that there was no need for one because Weiss was a Trump appointee and was fully authorized to conduct an aggressive, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may probe. He counted on the general lack of awareness — in the public and, apparently, the media — that because the DOJ carried the Biden investigation as a tax case, even Weiss could not file charges without approval from the DOJ’s Tax Division, which was run by Biden political appointees at Main Justice.
Meantime, Weiss played a double game. Publicly, he echoed Garland’s position that he (Weiss) was the ultimate decisionmaker on whether and where to file charges against the president’s son. But behind closed doors, as his subordinate Lesley Wolf repeatedly blocked agents from pursuing leads that could implicate President Biden, Weiss told investigating agents that he really wanted to pursue the case but was being thwarted by Main Justice. Specifically, Weiss claimed that he couldn’t charge Hunter, despite the damning evidence, because Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in California and Washington (the districts where venue lay for tax charges) were impeding him. Weiss indicated to investigators that, to circumvent the reluctant Biden-appointees, he’d approached Main Justice to get authority that would enable him to file charges in their districts, but he’d been rebuffed. Simultaneously, Garland was ensuring skeptical congressional Republicans that Weiss was making all prosecutorial judgments with complete independence and that the DOJ stood ready to give him whatever he needed.
It was all play-acting. If that weren’t clear enough on its face, consider that the gun case wasn’t moving either, even though venue for that one was in Delaware — Weiss’s own district. In the Justice Department, when there is a disagreement between U.S. attorneys about whether a case should be brought, the dispute is resolved by the attorney general (and the AG’s deputy, to whom presidentially appointed district U.S. attorneys report). The AG either orders the recalcitrant U.S. attorneys to cooperate, or orders the U.S. attorney who seeks to bring charges to stand down. U.S. attorneys cannot block other U.S. attorneys from filing charges unless the AG allows it to happen.
Clearly, Garland and Weiss were trying to pull off a hat trick: (1) making it appear that there was a good faith investigation of Hunter Biden, while (2) refraining from bringing any actual charges against Hunter Biden, and (3) seeking an opportune time to drop the investigation on the pretext that the evidence was insufficient — even as Republican-controlled House committees gathered mounting evidence of Hunter’s lucrative influence-peddling and perusal of his laptop data kept yielding more proof of criminality.
The circle proved impossible to square when the sweetheart plea deal blew up. That debacle brought unprecedented scrutiny to the overwhelming evidence of Hunter’s guilt. Ergo, pressure mounted on Garland to appoint a special counsel. Finally, Garland relented — in a manner of speaking. The special counsel he chose was . . . yes . . . Weiss — the very prosecutor who had spent five years sabotaging the investigation.
This could not have been more fraudulent. The special-counsel regulations, which Garland publicly claimed to be following, require that a special counsel be brought in from outside the government, and that he or she be the embodiment of competence, rectitude, and independent judgment. To the contrary, Weiss was a Biden DOJ insider who had long conducted the investigation exactly the way one would expect a conflicted prosecutor to conduct it — by undermining it at every turn.
But Garland covered his tracks in the fine print: In citing the special-counsel regs, his order appointing Weiss studiously omitted mention of §§600.1 through 600.3 — the provisions that both require the appointment of special counsel when the DOJ is conflicted, and mandate that the special counsel be a lawyer from outside the government. Moreover, in the appointment order, and in Weiss’s response when Hunter’s counsel later challenged Weiss’s appointment, the Biden Justice Department took pains to stress §600.10, the final special-counsel reg, which provides that no one — no defendant, no court, and no member of the public — may force the Justice Department to comply with the regulations. That is, the DOJ may ignore them with impunity . . . which is exactly what Garland has done in touting Weiss as a duly appointed “special counsel.”
Once appointed, Weiss tried to repair his reputation while nodding to the unavoidable political reality that the president’s son could no longer be spared. He has never, however, lost sight of the highest objective: to protect the president.
Five years after the fact — meaning nearly five years after a defendant who was not President Biden’s son would have been charged, convicted, and sentenced — Weiss finally indicted Hunter Biden in Delaware. Again, that’s Weiss’s own district, so he could have brought the case at any time, without any plausible claim that he was being obstructed by Biden-appointees. Weiss chose to delay. Because he did, Hunter now has a Second Amendment defense based on the Supreme Court’s Bruen case — decided in 2022, over three years after Hunter should have been charged. It may be an improbable claim on appeal — it certainly did Hunter no good in the trial court — but it is a claim he has solely because of Weiss’s strategic foot-dragging.
In his most energetic move in the long investigation, Weiss has brought a peculiar case against Alexander Smirnov. He is the former FBI informant, previously dubbed “highly credible,” who implicated President Biden (while he was vice-president) in a bribery scheme with Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter millions and thus enjoyed access to Joe’s influence. Weiss’s Smirnov probe appears to have featured a perjury trap, and the indictment sports gratuitous disclosures about Russian espionage — a topic the government typically resists addressing in public documents. A cynical commentator– not moi, of course — might wonder aloud whether the point of the Smirnov charges is to help the president fend off evidence of his complicity in the family influence-peddling business. In truth, the allegations against Smirnov — assuming they can be backed up by real proof — do not put a dent in the corruption evidence amassed by House Republicans. But Democrats surely appreciate the talking point.
At last, as the statute of limitations continued evaporating the Hunter Biden tax case, Weiss finally brought a tax indictment. It was so intentionally overdue that the 2014 and 2015 tax years — the Vice President Joe Biden tax years — could no longer be charged. Even without those crimes, it is highly probable that Hunter will face the imposition of a prison sentence due to the overwhelming evidence and high-dollar amount of tax evasion. Nevertheless, Weiss has achieved the Biden Justice Department’s main goals.
What goals?
First, although Hunter is charged with avoiding taxes on the huge windfalls he received by monetizing his father’s political influence, Weiss studiously avoided mentioning President Biden in the indictment, much less implicating him. What’s more, expect that Hunter’s lawyers will remind the public that Weiss already stipulated to the afore-described, hilariously entitled “statement of facts” filed with the court in connection with the failed sweetheart plea deal. Weiss thus agreed to a “factual” recitation that claims Hunter earned big fees because he was a high-end lawyer and businessman . . . not a drug-addled ne’er-do-well cashing in on his father’s political power.
Second, because Weiss declined to charge Hunter Biden for five years despite boatloads of damning evidence, the chance that the president’s son will face real justice and accountability for his crimes is nil. Hunter will not be sentenced on the gun convictions until later this year; even if a light prison sentence is imposed, he is sure to be released on bail pending appeal — an appeal that will not be decided until sometime next year, if then.
Meanwhile, the trial of the tax case is not scheduled until September. It is highly likely that Weiss will work out a plea deal with Hunter — one that, unlike the first one, will at least look like it has real teeth. But whether there’s a plea agreement or a trial — a trial it is hard to believe the Bidens would let happen in the weeks right before Election Day, with early voting already underway — the inevitable conviction will be timed so that Hunter’s sentencing is scheduled to occur only after the election.
Once the election is over, win or lose, President Biden’s public commitment to refrain from pardoning his son will no longer be operative. Either before Inauguration Day 2025 (if Biden has lost the election) or before Hunter is sent to prison (if Biden wins the election), President Biden will grant his son clemency on any and all prosecutions based on conduct up to and including the date of the pardon.
For that turn of fortune, Hunter Biden will be able to thank the very special counsel, David Weiss.
Still trying to blame the 5 yr SOL lapse on Barr...before the election. 
Imagine the uproar if the serving AG Barr, rather than Rudy, made the laptop an Oct surprise. The 51 retired spooks would have lead a Jan 6 insurrection, ...& sabotaging elections is their specialty.
