Tipsheet

Two Crucial Questions Merrick Garland Ignored

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  August 14, 2023 12:01 PM

Friday witnessed Attorney General Merrick Garland announcing the appointment of a Special Counsel in the Hunter Biden investigation -- which may have seemed like welcome news, in a vacuum.  But this particular news broke in the real world, and the development therefore cannot be considered a welcome one, given a great deal of available context.  It arrives not only far too late, but also features the hugely problematic elevation of the existing US Attorney assigned to the case, whose credibility on these matters has sustained several well-earned body blows in recent weeks.  The weekend has passed, various partisans offered their competing talking points on the Sunday chat shows, and my overall analysis of Friday's announcement remains the same as my initial take:

The IRS whistleblowers testified under oath that David Weiss' investigation was hampered, limited and effectively obstructed from within all along -- especially in regard to any evidence trails or interviews that might become problematic for Joe Biden.  One of those whistleblowers, a supervisory agent on the case, testified that Weiss told a roomful of frustrated subordinates last year that he wanted Special Counsel authority, and wished to pursue more serious charges against Hunter Biden, but was being stymied in jurisdictions controlled by Biden appointees.  He provided contemporaneous evidence supporting his memory of this conversation, as memorialized at the time in an email.  In response, Justice Department officials asserted that Weiss had always had full authority to pursue the case as he saw fit.  This disconnect -- between whistleblower Gary Shapley's recollection (backed by the 2022 correspondence) and the carefully-worded 'official' story from Garland and Weiss -- has always been a problem.  Now it's a bigger one:

If Weiss had all the power he needed all along, and Shapley was wrong about Weiss' private griping about lacking desired authority on the case, why finally give him that title, extremely belatedly?  And if one of the triggering events behind Garland's faux concession (I'll explain what I mean by that in a moment) was the implosion of Hunter's even-more-outrageous-than-known plea deal in open court, why hand more power to the man who signed off on it?  These are good, clear, legitimate questions:

The Weiss investigation allegedly ignored major evidence against Hunter Biden and the Biden family.  And the Weiss investigation produced a disgraceful plea agreement that grossly under-charged the president's son (after the president publicly stated that his son had done "nothing wrong") before dramatically disintegrating under the glare of a simple question from the presiding judge.  The Attorney General's response to this is to further empower this exact same person, whose probe has rightly drawn massive, negative scrutiny.  It smells awful, just like everything else about this case.  Erick Erickson's point above is a reasonable one, especially as the House GOP uncovered additional evidence of tens of millions in shady overseas cash flowing into various Biden bank accounts.  There's also this scathing assessment from Andy McCarthy:

Weiss is not eligible to be a special counsel under the special-counsel regulations. To be clear, the attorney general has all the authority he needs to assign Weiss to the case (and, indeed, Weiss has been assigned to it throughout Garland’s tenure). But under the regulations that Garland purports to be applying, what makes a special counsel special is that he or she is a lawyer brought in from outside the government, not just outside the Justice Department. As Section 600.3 of the regulations states without ambiguity, “the Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government.” The point of the exercise is to bring in a scrupulous, experienced former prosecutor who does not work for the incumbent administration, because there is a connection between the president and the investigation that creates a profound conflict of interest for the Justice Department. There could not be a more serious, blatant conflict of interest than a situation in which the president’s Justice Department is conducting an investigation of the president’s son that implicates the president in potentially impeachable conduct.

...Weiss is the vehicle by which the Biden Justice Department intends to maintain tight control over the so-called Biden investigation. No surprise there. Weiss has all along compliantly acted as the vehicle by which the Biden Justice Department protects the president, and thus the president’s son, from a credible investigation. It is Weiss who has already allowed the statute of limitations on any offenses arising out of the 2014–15 corruption — such as the Bidens’ dealings with Burisma — to lapse. It is Weiss who has never indicted Hunter Biden, even though his tax-evasion and gun crimes are straightforward and have been well known for many years. Weiss’s strategy is to resist obtaining a grand-jury indictment because such an indictment would stop the statute-of-limitations clock from lapsing on those crimes. The most outrageous revelation in the testimony of the whistleblower IRS agents who worked the Biden case was that Hunter’s defense lawyers were willing to waive any statute-of-limitations objections in the interest of getting a global plea agreement that would give him an immunity bath for all conduct from 2014 forward. It is Weiss who decided to just let the statute of limitations lapse instead. 

After McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor himself, runs through even more devastating indictments against the Weiss investigation (shielding 'the big guy' from any scrutiny, tipping off Hunter's lawyers to upcoming searches, etc.), he drops his bottom line: Weiss "has been abra-cadabra stamped as one so he can continue killing the 'ongoing investigation' he is running."  It's a terrible thing to say, but all of the baffling decisions in this case start to make a lot more sense through the prism of the person running it functionally operating as a shield on behalf of the Biden family -- both to utterly minimize any consequences for the president's son, and to fully insulate the president.  Extending that same person's power will strike many Americans as the opposite of a good-faith effort to provide meaningful transparency and accountability to bear.  Which very well could be the point.  The White House and Democrats now have a shiny new talking point to wave around about the DOJ taking this so seriously that a vaunted special counsel is now involved.  Never mind that it's the same guy who's fashioned the most favorable legal and political outcomes imaginable for the Bidens, given the facts with which he's been presented.  

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Garland knows all of this, of course.  He's made what looks like a political play that offers a false veneer of independence (many in the press will eagerly play along with this) while actually freezing the corrupt-appearing status quo further into place.  Better still for the White House, the 'ongoing special counsel investigation' deflection also offers them with a handy line to further avoid talking about this at all.  And it allows fruitful GOP Congressional probes to be both stymied on process grounds and disparaged as partisan.  In case you missed it, here was the president again snarling at one of the reporters who's actually asked questions about this scandal, and who elicited one of Joe Biden's famous campaign trail lies about his son's business back in 2019.  He's doubling down on the new version of the previous denial:

Juxtapose both claims with this response:

And with this:

Plus we have the 'ten percent held for the big guy' messages, documented in writing, regarding a lucrative payout from a CCP-linked Chinese firm (the same one Hunter threatened in writing, using his father's name to get the money he wanted).  It's not just that, of course, but there's also the little matter of Hunter's Ukrainian paymasters getting exactly what they wanted, and allegedly paid for directly, through the firing of a pesky prosecutor they wanted gone -- a maneuver explicitly executed by Hunter's father, who was running US policy in Ukraine at the time.  There's also the on-the-record statements of another Biden family business associate, Tony Bobulinski, who detailed Joe Biden's knowledge and involvement in the whole business model.  As Devon Archer testified, Joe Biden's power and influence was the business model, aka "the brand."  Has anyone offered any serious, above-board explanation for the tens of millions of foreign payments landing in Biden bank accounts, often funneled through multiple shell corporations?  The best I've seen Democrats serve up is that this may be unseemly cashing-in on a family name, but hasn't been proven to be illegal.  Similarly, and speaking of Bobulinski, has anyone substantively disproven a single claim he's made publicly?  Or the IRS whistleblowers?  Or, for that matter, the anonymous FBI informant alleging outright bribery against Joe Biden himself?