The judge, jury* and Justice Dept are all semi-corrupted actors working in tandem to support Biden's election and hammer a clown. And in some irony worthy of Lewis Carroll, they'll end up electing Donald as their shenanigans build up Donald's brand.
Now that's my idea of political satire.
*95% of the jury pool in DC voted against Trump in 2020.
‘Special Counsel’ Becomes a 2024 Election Joke
By designating David Weiss, Merrick Garland turns the concept inside-out to make sure Joe Biden can run against Donald Trump.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Aug. 11, 2023 6:36 pm ET
Merrick Garland announces the appointment of Special Counsel David Weiss in the ongoing investigation of Hunter Biden in Washington, Aug. 11. PHOTO: BONNIE CASH/REUTERS
The world is not quite right-side-up yet, but it’s getting there.
Special counsels are a bad idea but they exist for a reason, and Hunter Biden is a textbook example. Appointing a nominally independent prosecutor inside the Justice Department is a way for the department to gain credibility when forced to investigate its own president or those close to him.
To get fully right-side-up even by it own dubious standards, however, the department needs not just to name a special counsel in the Hunter Biden case, as it did Friday afternoon. It needs to return to the status of ordinary prosecutor Jack Smith, the special counsel in the Donald Trump case. How can it be a conflict of interest for the department to throw the book at criminals who also happen to be the president’s political enemies? It’s not. Mr. Smith was only named after a leak signaling Joe Biden’s displeasure with the department for not being aggressive enough against Mr. Trump. The Justice Department has every natural incentive to throw the book at Mr. Trump. If it couldn’t convince itself it had sufficient grounds, this might be a problem but it’s a corruption of the special counsel concept to believe it’s a problem the special counsel regulation should solve.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Friday’s announcement in the Hunter Biden case is bizarre in a different way when examined against special counsel logic. Mr. Garland said the Hunter investigation had “reached the stage” where such an appointment was appropriate. But the stage the case had reached, after being slow-walked for years, was the stage where Hunter and his prosecutors were caught trying to wave through a plea deal that would end the investigation even as prosecutors told the public the investigation was “ongoing.”
The absurdity of Mr. Garland’s announcement making David Weiss now a special counsel was all the greater because of the other “stage” the probe had reached. This would be the stage where IRS collaborators publicly accused Mr. Weiss and his Justice Department overseers of violating normal procedures to go easier on Hunter than they would on any other alleged offender.
Is Mr. Weiss the special counsel now going to investigate Mr. Weiss the ordinary U.S. attorney’s problematic handling of the case? Again, this handling includes a judge’s discovery in the plea deal of a hidden safe harbor for Hunter Biden that Mr. Weiss was publicly denying existed.
All this has Mr. Garland looking like the most hapless passenger on a hapless version of the Titanic sinking haplessly in the shallowest end of the kiddie pool.
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As the ship takes on water, his final act of principled rectitude has every appearance of being a last-ditch effort to keep the lid on Huntergate and his own department’s Clouseau-like handling of the case.
Is Mr. Weiss, with his new special counsel cape on, going to start noticing the accumulating evidence that Joe Biden actively abetted his son’s access-peddling scheme, which in turn led to millions of allegedly evaded taxes?
Is Mr. Weiss going to follow up on charges by his own IRS colleagues that his actions in the investigation were tainted by favoritism toward Hunter?
The only seeming reason for making Mr. Weiss the special counsel is so he can refuse to testify before the House committee independently scrutinizing the Biden family. Recently this includes unearthing the alleged receipt by multiple Biden family members of millions from Hunter’s international dealings. It includes the embarrassing recent testimony of his onetime business partner Devon Archer.
Understandably, the loyal opposition that voters placed in charge of the U.S. House now wants to add Mr. Weiss’s handling of the tax investigation to its own inquires, as any opposition would. Meanwhile, Joe Biden picked an unlucky moment, in a pretense of press accountability, to be interviewed by the Weather Channel. His fellow Democrats were simultaneously beating to death the line that if Joe Biden hobnobbed with Hunter’s clients, it was only to talk about the weather. Ha ha.
The elder Mr. Biden’s avoidance of the press, if that’s his campaign strategy, will be viable against one opponent only: the now thrice-indicted Mr. Trump. The president’s supporters in the liberal-left media may yet hold their noses and protect him from the Hunter fallout, but again it will be for one reason only: because Mr. Trump is his likely opponent. Now you might know why the same Justice Department that is trying so hard to finesse the Hunter matter is also working hard to make sure the furor surrounding Mr. Trump drowns out anybody who could otherwise challenge him for the nomination.
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