Special Counsel Who Prosecuted Hunter Biden Defends Investigation

The special prosecutor who brought criminal tax and gun-related charges against Hunter Biden used a final report on the investigation to push back against President Joe Biden’s claim that his son was unfairly singled out for political reasons.

“The President's characterizations are incorrect based on the facts in this case, and, on a more fundamental level, they are wrong,” special counsel David Weiss wrote in his report, which Attorney General Merrick Garland released publicly Monday and delivered to Congress. “These prosecutions were the culmination of thorough, impartial investigations, not partisan politics.”

The 27-page report sheds little new light on the facts unearthed during the investigation into Hunter Biden. Those facts were thoroughly ventilated in federal court proceedings in Delaware and California over the past year. In the Delaware case, a jury found him guilty in June on all three felony charges he faced there related to his purchase of a handgun in 2018, when he was addicted to crack cocaine. In the California case, the president’s son pleaded guilty in September to nine federal tax charges for failing to file returns and exaggerating his business expenses.

The president said on several occasions during the legal saga that he would not pardon his son. But on Dec. 1, the president broke that promise and granted sweeping clemency to his son, covering not only the charged cases, but any federal crimes he may have committed over more than a decade starting in 2014.

“I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” Biden said in a statement explaining the pardon and why he changed his mind. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”

Hunter Biden’s lawyers also frequently argued in court that the charges against him were “selective” and “vindictive.” Both federal judges who handled the cases rejected the efforts by defense attorneys to have the charges dismissed on that basis and one of the judges railed publicly against the president’s claims about the treatment of his son.

Weiss is the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Delaware, and he began investigating Hunter Biden before Joe Biden took office in 2021. Garland allowed Weiss to continue the probe and, in 2023, he made Weiss a special counsel — a status that gave Weiss greater independence to investigate and bring charges.

The release of Weiss’ report comes as Washington eagerly awaits a different special counsel report: the one produced by Jack Smith on his two criminal probes of Donald Trump. A federal judge on Monday cleared the way for the Justice Department to release one volume of Smith’s two-volume report.

The most pointed passages of Weiss’ report are his responses to the president’s assertions that his son was the victim of a political vendetta that prosecutors at the Justice Department acquiesced in and helped advance. But Weiss does not dispute the president’s power to issue the pardon to his son, or its scope.

“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.

Some Republican lawmakers urged Weiss to bring more charges against Hunter Biden, asserting that he violated various laws in his dealings with and on behalf of foreign companies he worked for. Prosecutors planned to air some of those claims during his trial on the tax charges, but the guilty plea averted that.

Weiss alluded in his report to the possibility of other charges against the president’s son, but said the scope of the pardon precluded the possibility. Due to the pardon, “it would be inappropriate to discuss whether additional charges are warranted,” the prosecutor wrote.

Garland’s letter transmitting the report to Congress made no reference to Weiss’ rebuttal to the president’s assertions. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the report.