NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE W ith President Biden now unabashedly influencing the criminal investigation of his son — as well as his other family members and himself — how can Attorney General Merrick Garland persist in refusing to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Biden-family scheme to cash in on Joe’s political influence, to the tune of millions of dollars pried from corrupt, anti-American regimes?
In a friendly interview on MSNBC on Friday, the chief executive made it clear to his subordinates at the Biden Justice Department that he has determined his son Hunter should not be charged with a crime. “My son has done nothing wrong,” said the president. “I trust him. I have faith in him, and it impacts my presidency by making me feel proud of him.”
This was blatant interference in the moribund investigation. The Justice Department and its assigned prosecutor, Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, have recently come under significant pressure due to whistleblower allegations from law-enforcement agents that there has been significant political interference in the probe and that the FBI has supposedly been sitting on evidence that implicates the president in a bribery scheme.
This has led to speculation that the scam I’ve been predicting for a couple of years is imminent: The Justice Department could soon give Hunter a sweetheart plea deal in which he would admit guilt to the undeniable — a minor tax charge or two, plus, perhaps, a false statement on a required federal firearms form, concealing his drug abuse. Swept under the rug would be the part of the investigation that really matters: The gross monetization of Joe Biden’s political influence and what foreign adversaries like China believed they were buying.
That, in turn, has led to consternation in the Republican-controlled House and for Republican senators — in particular, Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson — who have been investigating the Biden-family influence-peddling scandal for years. This weekend, House Oversight chairman James Comer admonished the Justice Department not to announce charges against Biden until after Wednesday — the day Comer has promised to roll out what the committee says it has learned about what he describes as a “racketeering” enterprise involving no fewer than nine Biden family members.
It is in this setting that the president made his public, evidence-free exculpatory assertions about Hunter, all for the benefit of his Justice Department subordinates — the same ones who’ve been cowed into not charging Hunter to date, despite several years of investigation (some of it involving such straightforward behavior that it should have taken just a few days, not five years, to probe — e.g., the false statement on a form filed for a gun he succeeded in purchasing, waved around a few days later while cavorting with a prostitute, and then lost across the street from a school).
Biden is running the same play that his former boss, President Barack Obama, ran for the benefit of Hillary Clinton — the Obama-Biden administration secretary of state whom Obama had endorsed for the Democratic nomination to succeed him in the White House.
Recall that in April 2016, the FBI was gingerly investigating Clinton’s email scandal: another probe in which a Democratic administration’s attorney general refused to appoint a special counsel while the Justice Department colluded with the subject’s defense lawyers to obstruct the FBI’s access to evidence and testimony. It was then that Obama took to the airwaves to make it clear that he did not want Clinton to be indicted. Of course, as Obama knew, any prosecution of Clinton would have exposed that he had knowingly communicated with Clinton over her nonsecure email system several times. The fix was in: Obama obfuscated the classified-information laws under which Clinton’s mishandling of national-defense intelligence was being half-heartedly investigated (and did not even mention her unauthorized retention of thousands of nonclassified government records).
With Obama’s intentions known, FBI director James Comey began drafting a public statement exonerating Clinton even though relevant evidence had not been reviewed and key witnesses — including Clinton herself — had not yet been interviewed. Three months later, when Comey held his press conference, his rationalization for not charging Clinton despite significant evidence of guilt echoed Obama’s earlier public statements (and conveniently omitted mention of the Clinton–Obama email communications). Immediately afterward, Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch, adopted Comey’s assessment — having declined to recuse herself and appoint a special counsel despite a raging conflict of interest that included her secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Clinton’s husband (former president Bill Clinton, who had first raised Lynch to national prominence by appointing her U.S. attorney in Brooklyn).
In the same way, Biden has made it clear that he does not want his son to be charged — and the president certainly does not want the probe expanded to scrutinize his own influence-peddling, including the curious manner in which millions of dollars from foreign operatives have been channeled to Biden-family coffers through a labyrinth of cutout companies and bank accounts.
Remember, Attorney General Garland appointed a special counsel — Jack Smith — to investigate former president Donald Trump’s unlawful retention of national-defense intelligence at Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s activities in trying to overturn the 2020 election, even though there is no conflict in the Biden Justice Department’s investigation of a Republican politician. Garland’s calculation was strictly political: Biden and Trump are running for president, so Garland wanted to insulate Biden from any eventual Biden-administration decision to indict Trump (knowing Trump will argue that Biden is weaponizing law enforcement against a political rival).
In connection with the Biden influence-peddling, on the other hand, there is an absolute, undeniable, unresolvable conflict of interest in the Biden Justice Department’s conducting an investigation of the president’s son, the president’s family, and the president himself. And if the Justice Department claims, under the circumstances, that it is not investigating the president’s involvement in his family’s raking in foreign money based on his political influence, then that is exactly why a special counsel is necessary.
Garland has appointed a special counsel — Robert Hur — to probe Biden’s mishandling of classified information. That, too, was a political calculation: Once Garland had unnecessarily appointed a special counsel for Trump’s mishandling of classified information, he had no choice but to appoint one when Biden’s own illegal retention of national-defense intelligence emerged. The plan, it appears, is to make that Biden investigation fade quietly away on the rationale that the president, unlike his predecessor, did not impede the grand jury’s investigation of his document retention and did not fight the government’s efforts to recover the documents — even though those distinctions do not change the fact that Biden appears to be a serial violator of classified-information laws, going back decades to his time in the Senate.
In any event, given that Garland should have appointed a Biden special counsel the moment he was confirmed as AG, since Biden’s own Justice Department cannot credibly investigate Biden, the AG has no excuse not to appoint one now. By his public comments Friday, President Biden is actively and corruptly influencing the Biden investigation. Moreover, Hur has already been appointed special counsel, so Garland could easily expand his remit to include the on and on and ongoing investigation of Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s influence-peddling.
Joe Biden is obstructing the investigation because Joe Biden knows he should be the main target of the investigation.