David Weiss has no credibility as special counsel for Biden investigation
Washington Examiner
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Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of U.S. Attorney David Weiss as special counsel in the Biden family investigation has become an insult to the public. Garland should replace Weiss with somebody fit for the job.
Weiss was an outlandish choice from the start, but new revelations make it look even worse. By law, logic, Garland’s earlier claims about Weiss’s authority, and Weiss’s performance, he isn’t a reasonable option.
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By law, Weiss isn’t even eligible for the post. Special counsel regulations explicitly say the appointee “shall be selected from outside the United States Government,” which is important to guarantee necessary independence for the job. Weiss is a government employee. A special counsel should focus only on the case to which his appointment applies, but Weiss will continue acting as U.S. attorney for Delaware, so he will be distracted by other duties.
On its face, meanwhile, Weiss’s appointment is illogical and self-contradictory. It is illogical because it defeats one of the biggest reasons a special counsel is needed, which is that a full review is necessary of why charges against Hunter Biden took inordinately long to be levied and why they were so lenient. A special counsel is therefore needed to review Weiss’s work. This appointment means Weiss will be reviewing his own conduct, which could not be a more obvious conflict of interest.
The appointment is also self-contradictory because, in practice, the only major power Weiss picks up is one he and Garland said he already had. Usually, a U.S. attorney has the authority to bring charges only in his jurisdiction (in this case, Delaware). Whistleblowers have testified that Weiss was blocked from bringing charges in California and Washington, D.C., but Garland and Weiss said Weiss enjoyed cross-jurisdictional authority if he wanted. Yet now, Garland names Weiss as special counsel to give him cross-jurisdictional authority. Does that mean Garland and Weiss were prevaricating earlier?
Those important but somewhat legalistic objections to Weiss fade in comparison to the significance of his failure to apply evenhanded justice for five years. Even apart from whether, technically and operationally, he is wrong for the job, new reports make manifest that he is personally unfit for this assignment.
We already knew of numerous examples of federal defendants punished far more heavily for the same offenses on which Weiss offered Biden extraordinarily lenient terms. We even knew of cases in which Weiss sought harsher penalties than he agreed to give the president’s son. We knew that Weiss bizarrely declined to keep the statute of limitations from expiring on some of the most important of Biden’s seemingly obvious infractions, including those involving the Burisma energy company and massive tax discrepancies, and that he never seriously pursued charges relating to the Foreign Agents Registration Act — an act the Justice Department has enforced aggressively against Republicans.
In recent days, though, we’ve learned even more damning information about Weiss’s handling of this investigation. Internal communications between Weiss and Biden’s legal team show Weiss was prepared to wrap up the investigation without filing a single charge or requiring a plea from the first son. His tune changed only once whistleblowers came forward to allege massively disparate treatment in favor of the Bidens.
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Weiss, who once worked closely with Biden’s late brother Beau Biden, allowed his investigative team to be rife with Democratic political donors and even one who called Hunter Biden “a good friend” and noted the many times the Biden “family have been there for us.” Meanwhile, reports keep emerging of leads Weiss seems not to have pursued, such as three alias email accounts used by then-Vice President Joe Biden, including ones in which Hunter Biden was repeatedly apprised of his father’s diplomatic efforts related to Ukraine, and even more meetings between Hunter Biden’s business partners and Vice President Joe Biden.
In sum, Weiss is not credible as an objective and competent leader of the Biden investigation. Garland should replace him immediately with someone of sterling reputation with no discernible partisan ties.