The deceit behind Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal gets even more audacious by the day

The Justice Department’s deceitfulness regarding Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal gets more audacious by the day.

Thanks to the media-Democrat complex’s partisanship, it also gets tougher to pierce — which, of course, is the point.

Delaware US attorney David Weiss is in a vice of DOJ’s own making.

Credible IRS investigators, including supervisory agent Gary Shapley, have reported that he told several law-enforcement officials connected to the Biden investigation that he was not the ultimate decision-maker regarding whether Biden would be charged, that he was being thwarted by other Biden-appointed US attorneys in Washington, DC, and California (the two districts with venue over tax charges) and that the Biden Justice Department, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, had refused his request to be appointed as a special counsel.

On the other hand, Garland, who is Weiss’ boss, has insisted — preposterously — that Weiss has always been the ultimate decision-maker and that all he needed to do was ask Garland for any extra authority he needed to file charges wherever he thought appropriate.

Garland claims he was never asked.

On Monday, Weiss tried to squirm his way out of this vice in a terse, disingenuous letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

In a nutshell, Weiss is straining to back up Garland while hoping no one notices that he does not deny the whistleblower allegations.

Weiss maintains that he did not formally request a special counsel designation (under Section 600 of the federal regulations governing the Justice Department).

Instead, he claims to have conferred with unidentified “Departmental officials” about being given authority under a different legal provision (Section 515 of the federal laws governing the functions of the attorney general) to file charges outside of his Delaware jurisdiction.

Ultimately, he adds, he was assured he would be granted Section 515 authority if it proved to be necessary, but he implies (though he is careful not to state outright) that he never asked — i.e., he says he has “never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.”

It’s a crock, through and through.

To begin with, if Weiss were denying the accounts of Shapley and at least one other whistleblower (the main IRS investigator on the case), he would say so. He hasn’t.

He obviously told them exactly what they say he told them. Ergo, he either lied to them because he was too cowardly to admit that he was undermining the politically fraught Biden investigation, or he is lying now to protect Garland and the Biden Justice Department.

Second, the Section 515 issue is a red herring. Such authority would have been relevant only if the US attorneys in Washington, DC, and California objected to Weiss’ filing charges in their districts. But those US attorneys work for Garland and, ultimately, President Joe Biden, who appointed them. 

Garland could have ordered them to partner with Weiss on any prosecution of Hunter Biden approved by Weiss and the Biden Justice Department’s Tax Division.

Turf battles are not unusual between district US attorneys. When they happen, they are resolved by the attorney general (usually, by the deputy attorney general — in the Biden DOJ, that’s Lisa Monaco). Garland wants you to believe he’s a powerless spectator. He’s not.

That brings us to the central deceit.

While Garland would have you believe Weiss would have been granted any necessary authority if only he’d asked, it was not Weiss’ job to ask. Rather, it was Garland’s duty to appoint a special counsel, regardless of whether a subordinate asked him to do so.

Under the regulations, a special counsel must be brought in from outside the government.

By definition, if Weiss had asked to be appointed a special counsel, he would effectively have been resigning his coveted position as US attorney for Delaware. Why would Garland have expected Weiss to ask for Garland to fire him?

More to the point, there is no provision in the regs for the AG to appoint a special counsel on request by a district US attorney.

Rather, the regs require the AG to name a special counsel if the AG is aware of a conflict of interest that prevents the Justice Department from investigating and prosecuting a case in the normal course.

There can be no greater conflict of interest than that posed by the president’s Justice Department’s having to investigate the president himself and/or a close family member of the president.

It is the textbook case for a special counsel.

The Biden Justice Department could not credibly investigate the Biden family. Garland knows that, yet he refused to appoint a special counsel.

The sweetheart plea deal is the result of the conflict of interest the AG was derelict in failing to address.

Weiss is just the fall guy. Garland is the culprit in this disgraceful saga.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor.