It was big news when Merrick Garland, Joe Biden’s hand-picked attorney general, said the federal employee who already had been investigating Hunter Biden, and in fact, appeared to offer him a sweetheart deal, was named “special counsel.”

But an expert says that really isn’t quite possible.

Hunter Biden has been under investigation for several years on tax charges and a gun count. He was offered a special deal earlier, from David Weiss, already a U.S. attorney, that would have let him off a long list of felonies with a couple of misdemeanors and a diversion program.

The deal fell apart when a judge started asking questions and the two sides didn’t agree on the answers.

Now Weiss reportedly is a “special counsel” investigating the same issues.

But longtime Democrat Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter professor of law, emeritus at Harvard, says Garland forgot a few things.

At the Gatestone Institute, he wrote, “When Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that he was appointing David Weiss as special counsel, he failed to mention § 600.3(c) of the Code of Federal Regulations entitled ‘Qualifications of the Special Counsel.’ These qualifications include the following: ‘The special counsel shall be selected from outside the United States government.’”

The lawyer pointed out that requirement “is the law.”

“If he feels that somehow there is an applicable exception to this requirement, he is obliged to explain why. Particularly when the special counsel is appointed to investigate the son of the incumbent president, who appointed Garland, every T should be crossed and every I should be dotted. Here we have what appears to be a clear rule using the word ‘shall’ rather than a more permissive word such as ‘may.’ The regulation on its face seems mandatory, and not advisory. If it is not, why not?”

Dershowitz noted the foundation for the requirement.

“There are good reasons for this requirement. Special counsel is supposed to be independent of the current government, not an employee who serves as U.S. Attorney for Delaware and can be fired from that job by the president. He is supposed to look at the evidence through the eyes of an outsider.”

In fact, he noted that the fact that Weiss already has been on the case for five years sounds like “good reason for not appointing” him.

“Even if there were persuasive reasons for naming Weiss as special counsel, Garland had an obligation to explain his apparent violation of a binding regulation. He did not do so at his press briefing. He can still do so now. And he should.”

He warned, “Democrats frequently say that no one is above the law. Yet they have been silent about Garland apparently placing himself above the law in choosing Weiss in violation of governing legal regulations.”

This article was originally published by the WND News Center.

This post originally appeared on WND News Center.