The special counsel whose investigation led to Hunter Biden being convicted of separate federal crimes hit back at the president, who had claimed that the prosecution of his son was politically motivated.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
When President Joe Biden issued the controversial and sweeping pardon for his son Hunter last year, he not only spared him from punishment for two felony convictions but also protected him from being prosecuted for federal crimes he may have committed over the course of more than a decade dating back to 2014.
But the president, who had vowed not to pardon his son, went a step further.
Biden justified his decision by saying that the prosecutions of Hunter for tax crimes and making incorrect statements when purchasing a firearm were politically motivated.
“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” the president said at the time.
Now, David Weiss, the special counsel investigating his son, hit back in his final report on the matter.
“I prosecuted the two cases against Mr. Biden because he broke the law,” he wrote in his report, which he submitted to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who had appointed him as special counsel in 2023. “A unanimous jury-who found Mr. Biden guilty of gun charges-and Mr. Biden himself-who pleaded guilty to tax offenses-agreed.”
Weiss rejects accusations that his probe was painted by politics and criticized the outgoing president for making them.
“Politicians who attack the decisions of career prosecutors as politically motivated when they disagree with the outcome of a case undermine the public’s confidence in our criminal justice system,” Weiss stated in his report. “The president’s statements unfairly impugn the integrity not only of Department of Justice personnel, but all of the public servants making these difficult decisions in good faith.”
Weiss added that none of the other presidents who pardoned family members also took shots at the public servants at the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Weiss, who also wrote that the sweeping nature of the pardon precluded him from making additional charging decisions and therefore did not make a recommendation as to whether Hunter Biden should be prosecuted for other offenses, went on to quote Mark Scarsi, the judge overseeing Hunter Biden’s tax evasion case. In acknowledging the pardon, Scarsi said that, while “the Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States,” it does not “give the President the authority to rewrite history.”
Critics of the prosecutions argued that other individuals would not have been charged with crimes in similar cases.
Of course, that begs the question of whether Hunter Biden was unfairly singled out or whether other tax cheats are not being scrutinized and held to account enough.
After all, there is no doubt that the president’s son did what he was accused of in the two cases.
Therefore, the elder Biden’s criticism should have been directed at House Republicans, who have spent millions of dollars investigating his son (in an attempt to get to the president) with very little to show for.
In the end, hardly anybody looks good in the entire affair.
Hunter Biden is a screw up, his dad went back on his word, and Republicans went on an expensive, taxpayer-funded fishing expedition. In all of this, Americans can’t be blamed for losing faith in a system that both sides criticize when they are “losing.”
Finally, while DOJ also made some mistakes, especially in not prosecuting Donald Trump’s crimes more quickly and vigorously, it is the one entity that ought to be commended for not allowing politics to seep into its decisions.
In the past four years, the law was applied fairly to Democrats and Republicans alike, no matter how much Trump and his supporters don’t want this to be true.
There is a good chance that the American people will soon yearn for these days once Trump and his nominees show the country what a weaponized DOJ really looks like.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
