Appointing Weiss Is Just Part Of DOJ’s Plan To Save Face In The Scandalous Hunter Biden Investigation
The corrupting and compromising Biden family’s international influence-peddling scheme is among the most epic scandals in American history, but the Biden Justice Department’s cover-up of the Bidens’ associated crimes is rapidly emerging as an epic scandal in its own right.
The latest leg of that scandal comes in the form of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of U.S. Attorney David Weiss to special counsel in the very Hunter Biden “case” his office has sabotaged.
Garland’s elevation of Weiss was rightly panned by many as outrageous on its face. Could there be anything more egregious than putting this uniquely conflicted fox in charge of the henhouse? Weiss was the very man who had led the faux investigation and sham prosecution of Hunter Biden in the first place that, having culminated in a collapsed plea deal, compelled Garland to empower a special counsel to bring charges elsewhere.
The appointment was made in violation of the special counsel regulations requiring unimpeachable appointees who come from outside the government to boot.
If for no other reason than the “optics” of it, one would think Garland would have followed the rules in appointing an “independent” special counsel to handle a crooked probe of the president’s son, concerning crimes tied to the monetizing of the president’s past office, led by the president’s Justice Department.
But then, Garland has many circles to square, and at least one reason to make Weiss the mop-up man in a long-running Justice Department conspiracy to obstruct justice for Hunter Biden to protect Joe Biden.
Step One: Position the Parties Against Each Other
To understand why the attorney general has acted as he has, ask yourself, the DOJ’s corruption having been exposed, what would you do in a desperate bid to save face?
First, you would make it seem as if DOJ and Team Biden are adversarial.
Up to the moment the Justice Department and Hunter Biden’s lawyers faced questioning over their sweetheart settlement in a Delaware courtroom, you would have been forgiven for thinking the two “sides” were not one and the same, co-counselors.
What more could the president’s son have asked of the president’s Justice Department and its partners than to let statutes of limitation on his most politically explosive alleged crimes lapse; spike crucial search warrants, critical approaches, and key interviews — including of Hunter himself; hide material information from IRS investigators; wave off FARA charges directly pertaining to the Biden family’s international influence-peddling business; and prevent the pursuit of leads pointing to Joe Biden?
DOJ was prepared to let the case die until the whistleblowers exposed all of this, causing the Department to blink … into colluding with Hunter Biden’s team to craft an unprecedented and indefensible sweetheart settlement. Only when Delaware Judge Maryellen Noreika questioned that settlement in court did the interests of the two sides — heretofore aligned in their desire to disappear the scandal of the Biden family’s selling out of America to adversaries and kleptocracies — diverge.
Hunter Biden’s team coveted the global immunity get-out-of-jail-free card hidden in the pretrial diversion agreement for which Hunter arguably should have been ineligible, and that no court was supposed to be able to touch. But when Noreika asked the DOJ if this was really what it was offering, irrespective of what it had represented to Hunter Biden’s lawyers as they negotiated the deal, there was no way the DOJ could stand by it. It would have been too reputationally damaging. The DOJ now had to put its own interests before those of the Bidens.
Hunter Biden’s team is no doubt genuinely livid the agreement fell apart. The DOJ is no doubt embarrassed the judge, in scrutinizing the agreement, exposed the department’s institutional rot.
Now Hunter Biden’s defense is going on the offensive, intimating litigation may be coming over the collapsed deal. We have also learned his counsel threatened the Justice Department that Joe Biden would testify on Hunter’s behalf to dissuade it from prosecuting. It is leaking details of the investigation to the press to paint the DOJ as political — not for having been too lenient on Hunter, but for being too tough on him in caving to the whistleblowers and bringing charges.
This is a purposeful rift that may provide cover should Hunter Biden ultimately emerge scot-free.
Step Two: Give the Appearance of Tough Prosecutors
This brings us to the second thing the DOJ would want to do if it were trying to save face: create the appearance of ratcheting up its prosecution.
Appointing a special counsel definitionally creates such an appearance, while serving both sides’ shared interest in washing their hands of the case in the least damaging way. Delaware was not the proper venue for Hunter’s tax-related offenses. The DOJ brought its case there because Hunter agreed to waive any venue challenge and plead guilty in his native state.
The proper venues for such crimes would have been Washington, D.C., and/or the Central District of California. The Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in those jurisdictions, however, had refused Weiss the ability to bring the charges before — charges perhaps only brought because the embattled scrupulous officials working the case had fought so hard for them.
With the DOJ and Hunter Biden’s team concurring the tax charges case ought to be dismissed from Delaware, and Judge Noreika granting them their wish, both “sides” can now seek out a more favorable venue and judge, should charges ever be brought.
Elevating Weiss to special counsel allows him to bring tax charges in the very venues where he had been denied previously – something DOJ has claimed it will do. This self-evidently contradicts Garland’s past claims about Weiss’s past authority, but nevertheless presents the appearance of ratcheting up the seriousness of the prosecutorial effort.
Step Three: Seize Control of the Narrative
This brings us to the third thing the Justice Department would want to do to save face: seize control of the narrative. With his special counsel appointment, Weiss is empowered to draft a final report on the case. Therein, he can whitewash the DOJ’s entire obstructive effort. Who better to absolve the DOJ of wrongdoing than the man who oversaw all of it?
Importantly for Garland, Weiss can “harmonize” his story with that of the attorney general about who had what power and when, and regarding the purported non-interference of main DOJ.
Weiss can also use the report to rebut, if not smear, the IRS whistleblowers. Theoretically, he could even go further than that. Hunter Biden’s counsel has called for the whistleblowers to be investigated. What if Weiss targets them pursuant to his charge to probe “any matters that arose from” the Hunter Biden investigation?
In the interim, though Congress by no means need respect the claim, Weiss could stonewall its effort by invoking the need to protect an “ongoing investigation,” further controlling the narrative.
The DOJ’s stonewalling over the case has already begun in earnest. If scrutiny dies down, Weiss could let further statutes of limitation lapse. He could slow-walk the case into a freeze as we approach the 2024 presidential election cycle. He could seek to craft a new sweetheart plea deal to provide Hunter immunity should the threat of prosecution increase with a Republican-elected president in 2024. If left without any alternative but to bring charges, and somehow finding himself with an inhospitable judge and jury, he could try to “throw” any case he brings.
The working assumption should be that Weiss is not so much a special counsel as the controlled opposition — newly empowered to only further thwart justice, not mete it out.
The only way to prevent a continued travesty of justice is for men and women of character in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches to act aggressively to expose this skullduggery, punish its perpetrators, and ensure the genuine rule of law is pursued and no man is above it.
Ben Weingarten is Editor at Large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.
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