Special counsel David Weiss is calling for a judge to reject Hunter Biden’s request for a trove of documents related to former President Donald Trump to bolster a defense that the current charges against him are due to selective prosecution.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers requested to ability to subpoena documents from Trump, former Attorney General William Barr, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue and former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, according to NBC.
The lawyers said Hunter Biden’s defense is that the charges stem from “possibly a vindictive or selective prosecution arising from an unrelenting pressure campaign beginning in the last administration,” according to CNN.
Hunter Biden faces three federal felony gun charges. In August, a plea deal to settle all charges against him collapsed, leading to new charges filed against Hunter Biden and the naming of Weiss. As U.S. Attorney for Delaware in the Trump administration, Weiss oversaw the initial investigation into Hunter Biden. After the plea deal collapsed, he was named a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden’s activities.
A filing from Weiss called for Hunter Biden’s proposal to be deep-sixed.
“His motion is meritless and should be denied,” the document filed by Weiss’s office said, calling it an “unsupported, improper attempt to circumvent the rules applicable to criminal subpoenas.”
“Defendant’s attempts to manufacture discriminatory treatment or intent on behalf of the U.S. Attorney fall apart under the most minimal scrutiny,” the filing said, saying the request for the documents was “notably deficient.”
The filing noted that Hunter Biden’s claims that he was charged because Trump was out to get him ignore the timing of the charges that were filed.
“[N]ot only does defendant’s motion fail to identify any actual evidence of bias, vindictiveness, or discriminatory intent on the Special Counsel’s part, his arguments ignore an inconvenient truth: No charges were brought against defendant during the prior administration when the subpoena recipients actually held office in the Executive Branch,” the filing said.
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“Defendant has not shown, nor can he, how external statements by political opponents of President Biden improperly pressured him, his Attorney General, or the Special Counsel to pursue charges against the President’s son,” the filing said.
“In addition to offering no evidence that the now-Special Counsel had any animus or improper motivation against defendant, he offers no evidence that the current Attorney General acted out of any improper motive in empowering the Special Counsel to continue pursuing prosecution,” the filing said.
The filing also noted that Hunter Biden has been very public about the conduct that led to the charges against him.
“Defendant himself acknowledged committing criminal conduct relevant to this case when he authored a book admitting that he was addicted to crack cocaine in 2018, the year in which he illegally purchased a gun,” the filing said.
As the lead of the initial investigation into Hunter Biden, Weiss was among those criticized by Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, who said the investigation was plagued by politics, according to Fox News.
Shapley said, “at every stage” decisions made by those in charge “had the effect of benefiting the subject of the investigation.”
Ziegler has said that Hunter Biden “should have been charged with a tax felony, and not only the tax misdemeanor charge” and that communications reviewed during the probe “may be a contradiction to what President Biden was saying about not being involved in Hunter’s overseas business dealings.”
Shapley and Ziegler are scheduled to testify Tuesday during a closed-door session of the House Ways and Means Committee as part of its investigation into the Biden family’s finances.
