Hunter Biden is facing legal trouble on multiple fronts, but it’s been an unorthodox journey to get here. Attorney General Merrick Garland will answer questions this week about the investigation into President Joe Biden’s son, where the spotlight will be on how much Joe Biden knew about his son’s business dealings. In this series, Wayward Son, the Washington Examiner will investigate how we got here. Part One examined how Hunter Biden’s failure to register as a foreign agent made him vulnerable to prosecution. Part Two showed how Hunter Biden’s foreign affairs extended beyond Ukraine. Part Three, below, will look at concerns surrounding the Department of Justice’s handling of the prosecution.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday comes after months of unanswered questions surrounding the Hunter Biden case.
House Judiciary Committee members are likely to grill Garland on several fronts, including the controversial prosecution of former President Donald Trump on charges related to the 2020 election and the seeming disparity in how aggressively anti-abortion activists have been prosecuted in recent years relative to Black Lives Matter activists.
RISKY BUSINESS: HOW HUNTER BIDEN’S FOREIGN DEALINGS COULD COST HIM ANOTHER INDICTMENT
Even some Democrats have expressed misgivings about how the Department of Justice has wielded surveillance authority under what’s known as Section 702, which Congress must reauthorize before the end of the year.
But the Hunter Biden investigation is likely to play a central role in Garland’s appearance before Congress, in large part because the Justice Department has refused to answer questions about it in any other context.
Here are seven questions for Garland about the Biden investigations.
Why did David Weiss need to become a special counsel if he always had full authority in the Hunter Biden case?
The most pressing set of questions for Garland may involve the authority Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss had during the first four years of the Hunter Biden investigation.
Garland maintained for two years that Weiss had all the authority he needed to advance the Hunter Biden case however he saw fit. The attorney general frequently cited the fact that former President Donald Trump had appointed Weiss to his position as evidence that Weiss was operating independently.
But testimony from two IRS whistleblowers and several FBI agents has since revealed that Weiss actually had to seek permission to bring charges against Hunter Biden outside Delaware, and in two other jurisdictions, Joe Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys denied Weiss’s requests.
No one at the Justice Department has answered repeated congressional inquiries about how Garland’s statements square with the evidence that Weiss did not have ultimate authority to investigate the president’s son.
Garland’s appointment of Weiss as a special counsel has deepened the scrutiny of the attorney general’s past statements given that Weiss would not have needed the appointment if he had indeed enjoyed autonomy throughout the investigation.
What’s more, Weiss himself has made contradictory statements to Congress. In letters to lawmakers, Weiss has both claimed to have had ultimate authority and that his charging authority was limited to his home district.
Why didn’t prosecutors present their case in California until President Joe Biden’s chosen US attorney was confirmed?
Investigators determined that some of the tax charges against Hunter Biden needed to be filed in California due to where the alleged violations occurred.
IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley said that investigators decided that alleged violations occurring in 2014 and 2015 should be charged in Washington, D.C., and “the remaining tax years, 2016, ’17, ’18, and ’19, needed to be brought in the Central District of California,” according to a transcript of his testimony.
That determination had been made relatively early in the case; another IRS whistleblower, Joseph Ziegler, told the House Ways and Means Committee that the investigative team had recommended charges be brought in California by February 2022.
“There was no explanation as to why, after being declined in D.C. for 2014 and 2015, that it took until mid-September 2022 to present the case to the Central District of California United States Attorney’s Office,” Shapley testified.
The Senate confirmed E. Martin Estrada, President Joe Biden’s nominee for U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, on Sept. 19, 2022. Weiss’s delay in asking that office for permission to charge Hunter Biden in its district meant that Estrada was given authority over the decision to charge the son of the man who’d appointed him.
Garland may face questions about the timing of the outreach to Estrada just days after he took office, particularly given that multiple witnesses have said investigators gathered more than enough evidence to build a case in California months earlier.
Is Hunter Biden the only person of interest in the ‘Sportsman’ investigation?
Hunter Biden is clearly the main target of the investigation that agents nicknamed “Sportsman”; he’s already faced now-withdrawn tax charges and felony gun charges stemming from the investigation.
But the possibility remains that investigators may have their eye on other people who participated in Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.
When announcing Weiss’s appointment as special counsel in August, Garland noted that the case began in 2019 when the U.S. attorney started looking into “allegations of certain criminal conduct by, among others, Robert Hunter Biden.”
At least one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners already received immunity to speak with the grand jury in Delaware, and a lobbying firm involved in Ukrainian business was also under investigation by the Justice Department for years.
A lawyer for Devon Archer, one of Hunter Biden’s former business associates, told the House Oversight Committee that Archer received immunity before testifying before the grand jury in Delaware.
Blue Star Strategies, a Democratic lobbying firm, faced a DOJ investigation over its work for Burisma before the firm was inexplicably allowed to disclose the foreign lobbying it did for the Ukraine energy company, in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, years after the work occurred.
Then there was the involvement of two other Biden family members who, according to two IRS whistleblowers, could not be mentioned in witness interviews or other investigative materials at the direction of Justice Department officials.
James Biden, the president’s brother, also made money working for foreign entities and was involved in a Chinese deal that drew the scrutiny of investigators. And Joe Biden willingly participated in at least a handful of meetings involving Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates from across the world, potentially exposing him at least as a witness in the Sportsman case.
What did the Justice Department do to look into the Biden bribery allegation?
FBI agents recorded a bribery allegation involving Joe and Hunter Biden in June 2020, writing the details of the alleged bribe in a form known as an FD-1023.
The allegation came from the recollections of a source whom the FBI seems to have treated as highly credible in the past.
The document, made public in July by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), suggested that multiple executives at the Ukrainian energy company had boasted about paying millions of dollars to the Biden family to help make an investigation of Burisma disappear.
Several details of the alleged bribe line up with facts of the case, including Burisma’s interest at the time in investing in a U.S.-based energy company, the reliance on shell companies to wire money to Hunter Biden, and the use by Hunter Biden’s business associates of the nickname “Big Guy” to describe Joe Biden.
Rob Walker, a former Hunter Biden business partner, told the FBI in 2020 that the “Big Guy” nickname indeed applied to Joe Biden.
But the FBI and the Justice Department have refused for months to answer questions about what, if anything, investigators did to substantiate the allegation.
In fact, FBI leadership initially attempted to deny that the FD-1023 document even existed.
Specific names surface in the FD-1023 form, including two Burisma executives and a third Ukrainian, Oleksandr Ostapenko, who has since spoken out with corroborating claims of Biden family corruption in Ukraine. Ostapenko faces U.S. sanctions for alleged election meddling related to his public accusations against the Biden family.
Garland could face questions about whether the FBI ever attempted to interview any of the three people cited as having participated in the conversations about the bribery allegation or whether investigators attempted to verify any of the other specific details in the FD-1023 document, such as the timing and location of meetings mentioned.
Why did the Justice Department ask the IRS and FBI to hand over all emails and documents related to the Hunter Biden case last year?
Shapley, the IRS whistleblower, told the House Ways and Means Committee that the DOJ made an unusual request in March 2022: The agency wanted “all management-level emails and documents” produced during the Hunter Biden investigation.
Shapley said the request was strange because the Justice Department usually only requests emails at the case agent level and only because those communications could appear in discovery. Emails and documents written by their supervisors, however, aren’t discoverable, and therefore the DOJ’s typical reason for reviewing them didn’t apply in the Hunter Biden case.
Before the request, Shapley said he had raised his concerns about unethical conduct in the investigation internally at the IRS, including by documenting his concerns as they arose throughout the investigation.
In October 2022, Shapley said, the Justice Department suddenly requested the reports Shapley had compiled to date, as well as all his emails.
“Their extraordinary request looked to us just like a fishing expedition to know what we’d been saying about their unethical handling of the case,” Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee in closed-door testimony.
Lawmakers may want to know why the Justice Department demanded records from high-level officials on the Hunter Biden case before removing the entire IRS team from the investigation.
Why was Hunter Biden’s defense team given the opportunity to help draft the initial plea deal?
Hunter Biden nearly escaped further legal scrutiny in July when he showed up in a Delaware courtroom to accept a lenient plea deal offered by Weiss. The deal would have likely spared Hunter Biden from jail time and conferred broad immunity on him for nearly all of the foreign business deals he struck while his father was in office.
That deal collapsed under questions from a judge, leading Weiss to withdraw it and file another indictment against Hunter Biden this week on a gun offense.
A report last month in Politico suggested that Hunter Biden’s lawyers played an enormous role in drafting the language in Hunter Biden’s plea deal, corroborating testimony from Ziegler about the unusual deference the Justice Department seemed to be giving Hunter Biden’s lawyers.
Garland could face questions about whether prosecutors followed standard procedure when putting together the deal, as well as whether defense teams in similar high-profile cases would be given as much input in a plea deal as Hunter Biden’s was.
What explains the different approaches taken in the Trump and Biden classified document cases?
Both Trump and Joe Biden found themselves in awkward positions over the past two years: They realized they’d taken classified material with them after leaving high office.
Both men handed over to the government classified documents their teams had found in their homes.
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But the FBI raided Trump’s home last year after issuing subpoenas that allowed agents to gather enough evidence to give them probable cause for the surprise search; Joe Biden’s lawyers, by contrast, were given multiple opportunities to schedule consensual searches with the FBI.
Trump’s critics argue his lawyers knowingly withheld some classified documents from investigators; however, the DOJ approved aggressive investigative steps to arrive at that conclusion, and there’s no evidence the DOJ took any similar steps to verify that what Joe Biden’s lawyers said was true.
