I’ve pointed out time and again (including yesterday) that Biden Justice Department AG Merrick Garland’s “special counsel” appointment of Biden Justice Department Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss in the Hunter Biden case is a fraud on the public.

In a pretrial ruling denying the younger Biden’s motion to dismiss the case, Judge Maryellen Noreika has confirmed that Garland’s appointment of Weiss did not comply with federal regulations for appointing special counsels. That, however, was not a basis to dismiss the case — particularly with Garland and Weiss quietly citing the last special-counsel regulation, §600.10 (of Title 28, Code of Federal Regulations), which provides that no one may hold the Justice Department accountable for flouting its own regulations.

To be clear, I have never contended that Garland lacked the authority to assign Weiss, or whoever he wanted to assign, to investigate the Biden case. As Judge Noreika correctly explained, federal statutory law — in particular, §§509, 510, 515, and 533 — vest attorneys general with sweeping power to run the Justice Department as they see fit, including power to designate any DOJ lawyers they choose to run investigations anywhere in the country.

Weiss, for example, is now prosecuting Hunter Biden in Los Angeles, on the tax case scheduled to begin trial on September 5, in addition to the gun case in Weiss’s own Delaware district. That’s because Garland doubled-down in assigning the investigation of the president’s son to the same prosecutor — Weiss — who had just schemed with defense lawyers on a failed sweetheart plea deal that was designed to make all conceivable cases against said son disappear (and only after Weiss had consciously dithered as the statute of limitations steadily eviscerated serious criminal offenses).

Garland is the attorney general, and he has that power. It is power he wields with no fear that Congress will slash the DOJ’s budget, censure him, impeach him, or do anything else but caterwaul over how he abuses it. My point is that Garland has been engaged in a nearly four-year fraud — trying to con the country into believing the Justice Department is neither protecting its boss nor trying, to the extent politically feasible, to protect the president’s son.

The AG refused to appoint a special counsel for the Biden investigation, despite the president’s (and other Biden family members’) being implicated in Hunter’s malfeasance, particularly crimes arising out of his peddling of his father’s political influence for huge pay days from agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes. Garland rationalized his defiance of the regulations calling for a special-counsel appointment by insisting that Weiss was a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who would be given unchecked discretion to follow the evidence wherever it led, and bring whatever charges were appropriate in whichever district the venue lay.

In reality, Weiss had no connection of significance to Trump. He was appointed because he had the support of Delaware’s two Biden-allied Democratic senators. He was the sole Trump-appointed prosecutor retained when President Biden took power because he had proved useful.

To recap, prior to Biden’s taking office, Weiss had had the Hunter investigation for over a year and done nothing on it — other than thwart the agents who were trying in good faith to investigate it. In the months prior to the 2020 election, he had taken no prosecutorial action despite the overwhelming evidence of Hunter’s gun and tax crimes. He had stood silently by when Biden-allied former intelligence officers and Biden himself claimed the infamous laptop data detailing Hunter’s plethora of wrongdoing was a Russian influence operation, even though Weiss’s FBI investigators had authenticated the laptop nearly a year earlier. He had stood silently by when the FBI nudged social-media organizations to suppress the laptop story as Russian disinformation.

Subsequently, through almost all of the first three years of the Biden administration, Weiss sat on his hands while the statute of limitations erased crimes stemming from Hunter’s monetization of his father’s political influence during Joe Biden’s tenure as Obama administration vice-president. Then, finally, Weiss colluded with Hunter’s lawyers to fashion a plea bargain that would (1) dispose of all remaining tax charges with no prison time, (2) disappear the gun case on a “diversion” arrangement for which Hunter was not eligible under DOJ rules, (3) negate the possibility of any future prosecution of Hunter on crimes arising out of his years of influence-peddling, and (4) endorse a statement of facts — patently drafted by Hunter’s defense lawyers — that portrayed his millions in revenue as traceable to his work as a high-end lawyer rather than as selling access to his father’s political power.

Weiss and Garland played a deceptive game.

Weiss told investigating agents that he couldn’t indict Hunter because he was being blocked by Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in districts that had jurisdiction over Hunter’s tax crimes (even though no charges had been filed on the gun case, either — which was in Weiss’s own Delaware district). He confessed to frustrated agents that he had been rebuffed by Main Justice (i.e., Garland and his top aides) when asking for special-counsel status that would empower him to file charges anywhere.

Meantime, Garland insisted to Congress that Weiss had full discretion to file charges — notwithstanding that he had not formally given Weiss that authority and that the Biden DOJ was carrying the Hunter investigation as a tax case, meaning Weiss needed approval from Tax Division (run by Biden appointees at Main Justice) before seeking an indictment. Furthermore, as Garland well knows, in the Justice Department a district U.S. attorney is not permitted to block another district U.S. attorney from bringing a worthy case; rather, when there is a dispute, the Attorney General intervenes and orders either that the intransigent U.S. attorney cooperate in the prosecution or that the U.S. attorney seeking to file charges stand down. If Weiss was being blocked by Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys from filing charges against Hunter, it was only because the Biden-appointed attorney general — Garland himself — was letting it happen.

In the end, Garland endured the humiliations of (a) whistleblower agents going public about the manner in which Weiss and the Biden Justice Department were undermining the Hunter investigation, and (b) watching the sweetheart plea deal Weiss had crafted unravel when Judge Noreika asked a few rudimentary questions. Only then did the attorney general appoint a special counsel.

And, Garland being Garland, the “special counsel” he appointed was . . . David Weiss.

Under §§600.1 through 600.3 (you’ll want to remember those numbers), the DOJ regs dictate the appointment of a special counsel whenever the Justice Department is plagued by a deep conflict of interest, as it is when an investigation of the president and/or his close family members must be undertaken. To ensure the maximum independence practicable under constitutional constraints (which mandate that all federal prosecutors serve at the president’s pleasure), the regs require that a special counsel “shall be selected from outside the United States government” — i.e., not just outside the DOJ and the president’s administration, but outside all government entities. Moreover, §600.3 elaborates, the special counsel must be

a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking, and with appropriate experience to ensure both that the investigation will be conducted ably, expeditiously and thoroughly, and that investigative and prosecutorial decisions will be supported by an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies.

In denying Hunter’s dismissal motion, Noreika not only acknowledged that Garland did not comply with the relevant regulations in appointing Weiss as a special counsel; she pointed out that Garland’s August 11, 2023, appointment order takes pain to exclude §§600.1 through 600.3 of the special-counsel regs — the above-described “mandates” that a special counsel be appointed when the Justice Department is conflicted, and that the special counsel be an attorney with a reputation for rectitude and a record providing confidence that a thorough, credible investigation will be conducted.

Needless to say, Garland did expressly rely on §600.10, the regulation that says the DOJ can ignore its own regulations with impunity.

With great fanfare last August, after the Hunter plea-bargain debacle, Garland laughably told the public he was appointing as “special counsel” Delaware U.S. attorney Weiss — i.e., a high-ranking Biden DOJ official who had already undermined the investigation, not a competent lawyer with a reputation for integrity from outside the government. This, we were told, was done in order to bolster Weiss’s capacity to conduct an independent investigation of the president’s son.

In reality, Garland carefully skirted the special-counsel regs and relied on his power to do whatever he wants in doling out DOJ assignments — including appoint a prosecutor who had demonstrated his commitment to keeping Hunter’s mess away from the president.