Attorney General Merrick Garland denied that his office has interfered in the Hunter Biden criminal investigation during a Tuesday press conference.
Last month, an IRS supervisory agent filed a whistleblower complaint with relevant congressional leadership alleging through his attorney that Garland had done just that.
What We Know
A reporter asked Garland if he stands by prior testimony saying he would not tamper with the investigation.
“I stand by my testimony and I refer you to the attorney for the district of Delaware, who is in charge of this case and capable of making any decisions that he feels are appropriate,” Garland said responding to a reporter’s question about the whistleblower complaint.
Reports indicate that FBI and IRS completed their investigations into Biden’s alleged federal tax and firearms violations and concluded that charges should be brought. Suggested criminal charges included two misdemeanor charges for failing to file income taxes, a single felony count of failing to report a year of business taxes, and a potential felony firearms charge for lying about his drug use on a federal firearms form.
The whistleblower’s attorney Mark Lytle wrote that his client believed that a high-ranking Justice Department official, later identified as Garland, was responsible for slow-walking the investigation.
“The protected disclosures: (1) contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee, (2) involve failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case, and (3) detail examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected,” the letter said.
Hunter Biden: What Happens Now?
Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee, is nearing the end of deciding whether or not to charge Biden, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Biden’s memoir “Beautiful Things” recounted that he smoked crack every 15 minutes, which brought prosecutors to examine whether he had truthfully answered the portion of the federal gun purchase form. It asks the purchaser if he or she has used illegal drugs in the past.
Republicans in Congress and the right-leaning watchdog group Judicial Watch have questioned why Biden has not been charged with a firearms crime in recent weeks.
They also have questioned the money Biden received from Burisma, the reputedly corrupt Ukrainian energy company, and the millions he raked in from CEFC Energy, a Chinese company with close ties to that country’s military intelligence apparatus.
Garland has pushed back against Republican calls for a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden and his finances, claiming that Weiss can handle the investigation himself.
Biden’s attorney Chris Clark met Justice Department officials last week to obtain an update on the status of the investigation.
Clark denounced the whistleblower last month, accusing him of breaking the law.
“It is a felony for an IRS agent to improperly disclose information about an ongoing tax investigation,” Clark said. “The IRS has incredible power, and abusing that power by targeting, embarrassing, or disclosing information about a private citizen’s tax matters undermines Americans’ faith in the federal government. Unfortunately, that is what has happened and is happening here in an attempt to harm my client.”
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John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award in 2008 for his reporting.
