Attorney General Merrick Garland would personally have to authorize any potential charges against Hunter Biden, he admitted Wednesday amid concerns that President Joe Biden’s Justice Department (DOJ) has been politicized under his leadership.
Hunter has been under investigation by David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Delaware, for potential tax and gun violations for years. Yet no charges have been levied. Garland has refused to appoint a special prosecutor in the investigation to avoid a conflict of interest between the Biden family and himself.
When Garland was questioned if Weiss could charge Hunter without outside political pressure, he responded before the Senate Judicial Committee that Weiss “has been advised that he has full authority to make those kind of referrals that you are talking about and to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary.”
“And I will assure that if he does, he will be able to do that,” Garland testified, noting he would have to sign off on the charges.
“I would then have to authorize it and permit it to be brought in another jurisdiction and that is what I promised I would do,” he said.
In recent years, Americans have lost trust in the DOJ in the wake of its spying on former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, alleged failure to investigate Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell,” and the recent bombshell revelation that a former New York FBI spy chief was indicted for violating U.S. sanctions by agreeing to provide services to a Russian oligarch.
Republicans have questioned why Hunter has not been charged in Weiss’s investigation of Hunter’s alleged tax and gun violations. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) stated Tuesday the U.S. attorney has enough evidence to indict Hunter Biden for serious violations found on his abandoned “Laptop from Hell.”
House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY). (Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“There’s enough to indict Hunter Biden now, there was enough to indict Hunter Biden three or four years ago with what’s on the laptop,” he exclaimed on the Lou Dobbs’ podcast. “So for whatever reason, this U.S. attorney hasn’t produced very many results.”
Republicans have also questioned why former FBI “point man” Timothy Thibault allegedly “shut down” a probe into Hunter’s laptop that is likely unrelated to the ongoing criminal investigation concerning reported tax fraud by the president’s son.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said whistleblowers told his office in February that FBI personnel at the Washington Field Office “improperly ordered information to be closed by the FBI related to Hunter Biden’s potential criminal conduct in October 2020 — just before the election — even though it was verified or verifiable.”
“Merrick Garland owes the nation answers on why this Justice Department has refused to properly investigate Hunter Biden,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said Tuesday.
The DOJ’s investigation of Hunter is a separate probe from Comer’s congressional inquiry. Comer launched an investigation in November into the Biden family for nine violations, including wire fraud and money laundering.
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from Hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing even to have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.