Where is the indictment?

Let me back up for a sec. If you are a normal person reading our Brittany Bernstein’s report about the new House Oversight Committee memorandum on the Biden influence-peddling business, the number that pops your eyes is $20 million. But if, like me, you were a former prosecutor jaded by the Biden Justice Department’s unabashed sabotage of the Biden-family corruption “case” — which the media–Democratic complex tirelessly labels the “Hunter Biden case,” lest we notice the more consequential Biden who is up to his presidential neck in it — the numbers that drop your jaw are 2014 and 2015:

Why are these dates more significant to me than the exorbitant dollar amounts? The federal statute of limitations for relevant tax crimes is six years. The federal statute of limitations for other relevant crimes is five years. And what stops the statute of limitations from continuing to run until potential criminal charges lapse? The filing of an indictment.

The Biden Justice Department has never filed an indictment in the Biden “case.” That is why I put the word case in quotes. There is no Biden case in the sense of an appropriately aggressive investigation that would trigger the Justice Department’s practice of filing an indictment that comprehensively outlines criminal wrongdoing and its guideline of accepting a guilty plea only if it includes the most serious, readily provable charge.

The Justice Department opened what it pretends is its “Hunter Biden case” in 2018. By 2019, it was obvious that there were significant tax felonies, as well as a firearms felony. If there had been an actual investigation — of the kind, say, that special counsel Robert Mueller’s staff of activist Democrats conducted of Paul Manafort, whose wrongdoing is similar to that in which the Bidens appear to have engaged — there might well also be grounds for money-laundering and Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) felonies.

When Mueller’s alpha-prosecutors found evidence against Manafort, though, they charged him. In stark contrast, when the terminally passive Biden Justice Department was reluctantly forced to notice evidence implicating Hunter Biden and his family members, particularly the now-president, they did nothing. They sat by while the statute-of-limitations clock kept ticking . . . and ticking . . . and ticking . . .

Charges based on suspected criminal conduct prior to 2016 — and maybe even prior to 2017 or 2018 in some instances — are already time-barred. That is because the Biden Justice Department refuses to indict. This is strategic inaction. The most astonishing aspect of the recent testimony by IRS whistleblower agents was that, in the interests of striking a global, sweetheart plea deal that would cover Hunter Biden for all years and all conceivable crimes, his lawyers were prepared to waive statute-of-limitations objections; the prosecutors did not accept this offer.

Got that? It was the Biden Justice Department that chose to allow the charges involving perhaps the most serious corruption evidence (e.g., Burisma 2014–15) to become time-barred.

All that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s prosecutors needed to do to prevent that from happening was to indict. They wouldn’t do it.

Today is August 9. It has been two weeks since the July 26 implosion of Hunter Biden’s plea bargain in Delaware U.S. district court. Have you heard of any indictment? Me neither.

In a normal investigation in which Hunter’s crimes were well known for years before he agreed to a guilty plea, there would already have been an indictment before the plea — to make sure the charges were preserved. Once the plea deal collapsed because of Judge Maryellen Noreika’s pointed questioning about its indefensible terms, the next step for any competent prosecutor would have been obvious: Get to the grand jury and indict the case. That wouldn’t prevent the government from offering Hunter yet another appalling plea bargain, but it would make sure whatever charges could be brought were still viable.

But, of course, there is still no indictment, for two reasons. First, the Biden Justice Department is trying to make the case disappear, banking on the fact that the media won’t report that the lack of an indictment means that charges continue to be lost to the passage of time. Second, if prosecutors outlined the charges the way the Justice Department customarily does in high-profile cases — the way, for example, Jack Smith has in the three Trump indictments he has filed in the last few weeks — it would be politically untenable for the president’s Justice Department to give the president’s son a plea to two puny misdemeanor tax charges in exchange for a full immunity bath and no jail time.

There is no indictment because there is no case.

What the Biden Justice Department pretends is an “ongoing investigation” is not real. It’s a black hole. It is a paper artifice that enables Garland and his subordinates to tell Congress and the few journalists who ask probing questions that they can’t provide answers or documents because that might “compromise their ongoing investigation” — you know, one of those remarkable investigations that stumbles on crime after crime but somehow never results in the filing of charges.

If the Biden Justice Department were really conducting a Biden investigation, prosecutors would never have allowed Devon Archer’s congressional testimony. They would have protested that such testimony would wound their investigation (by exposing facts that needed to remain secret so investigators could pursue leads and by saddling prosecutors and the witness with a transcript of haphazard congressional testimony that defense lawyers could use to cross-examine Archer at any subsequent trial). And Congress wouldn’t have pushed to make Archer appear, because lawmakers don’t like to be perceived as undermining a serious DOJ probe.

The Biden Justice Department permitted Archer to testify to Congress because the prosecutors have no plan to use him as a witness in a serious case — a case against the Bidens. If they did, he’d have a cooperation agreement; instead, he has prosecutors pushing to have him report to prison.

It has been reported that Archer may have been questioned in the grand jury. I have my doubts. Have you looked at his congressional testimony (linked above)? Check out pages eleven and twelve. That’s when Archer was first asked about Burisma. Questioned about the start of his involvement, Archer struggles: “Approximately the early . . . like 2010 to ’15 at some point, in that time. Or not to 2015. 2010 to 2014. I don’t know exactly, but I could figure it out.”

He could figure it out, of course, because there is an extensive paper trail. If he had met with prosecutors who were conducting a serious investigation, they would have walked him through the paper trail in painstaking detail before having him testify in the grand jury. He would, by the time he sat down with the committee, have known the story cold because his recollection would have been energetically refreshed. Yet, speaking with lawmakers about a subject he appeared to be trying to help them understand, Archer couldn’t remember when exactly, in a five-year period — the most important five-year period of his life — major events happened, such as his and Hunter’s installation on the Burisma board that paid them millions of dollars.

That’s because there is no Biden Justice Department investigation. Archer is fuzzy on the details because Garland’s prosecutors didn’t see any upside in helping him remember the details and relate them in a linear, compelling way. That would be bad for the objective of disappearing the case. It would be really bad for the president.

And that, of course, is why Garland has never appointed a special counsel from outside the government to run the Biden “case.” If he’s going to protect the president, the attorney general cannot allow the “case” to get too far out of his control. If he appointed a real, scrupulous prosecutor to carry out the kind of investigation the Justice Department typically carries out, then the “case” might become a case.

Can’t have that.