Special counsel David Weiss savaged President Joe Biden for his attacks on the Justice Department’s prosecution of Hunter Biden for tax and gun crimes, writing in a report delivered to Attorney General Merrick Garland and made public on Monday that the president’s "baseless accusations" about the cases erode public confidence in the Justice Department and undermine the rule of law.
A Delaware jury found Hunter Biden guilty of three felony gun charges in June after he was found to have lied about being a crack addict while purchasing a gun. The first son then pleaded guilty to felony tax evasion charges in September. Biden pardoned his son on Dec. 1, breaking repeated promises not to do so, arguing that his son was "selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted" as a result of pressure from "several of my political opponents in Congress."
Weiss methodically knocked down the president’s claims.
"Other presidents have pardoned family members, but in doing so, none have taken the occasion as an opportunity to malign the public servants at the Department of Justice based solely on false accusations," Weiss wrote in the Jan. 10 report.
Weiss’s pointed comments mark the second time in as many months that a federal official has taken issue with claims made by the president in a press release that accompanied the pardon of Hunter Biden. In the first instance, district court judge Mark Scarsi, who presided over the Hunter Biden tax evasion cases, wrote that the Constitution grants the president the pardon power but not the power to "rewrite history."
Weiss, for his part, defended the impartiality of the Justice Department’s decision-making process. "These prosecutions were the culmination of thorough, impartial investigations, not partisan politics," he wrote. "Eight judges across numerous courts have rejected claims that they were the result of selective or vindictive motives," he said. "Calling those rulings into question and injecting partisanship into the independent administration of the law undermines the very foundation of what makes America's justice system fair and equitable. It erodes public confidence in an institution that is essential to preserving the rule of law."
Hunter Biden’s tax evasion could not be blamed on his drug addiction, Weiss wrote, stating that the first son "filed his false 2018 return, in which he deliberately underreported his income to lower his tax liability, in February 2020, approximately eight months after he had regained his sobriety."
Far from being the fruit of a selective prosecution, the gun crimes with which Hunter Biden was charged are among the most common firearm offenses prosecuted by the Justice Department, Weiss argued, citing an agency review of data collected between 2008 and 2017. That analysis found that the charges Hunter Biden faced "are brought more frequently than over 90 percent of the other available firearm offenses. Out of the 86 different types of federal gun charges listed in that study, the gun charges filed against Mr. Biden are the fifth, seventh, and eighth most frequently charged offenses, respectively."
Weiss also took care to note that, prior to the president’s issuance of a pardon, Biden and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre "repeatedly and emphatically asserted" that the investigation and prosecution were carried out independently.
The prosecutions, Weiss wrote, "were the embodiment of the equal application of justice–no matter who you are, or what your last name is, you are subject to the same laws as everyone else in the United States."