Criminal Justice

Hunter Biden special counsel defends probe, denounces Biden's DOJ criticism

  •  
  •  
  •  
  • Print

President Joe Biden with Hunter and Valerie Biden

President Joe Biden, his sister Valerie Biden and his son Hunter Biden exit the residences for Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on July 26, 2024. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The special counsel who prosecuted President Joe Biden’s son Hunter defended his investigation in a report released Monday, rebutting claims by the president and his family that the cases were politically motivated.

The report is the final round of a bitter fight between the outgoing president and his administration’s Justice Department, which inherited the investigation of Hunter Biden after Donald Trump’s first term in the White House and brought two indictments against him in 2023. The younger Biden was convicted on federal gun charges at a jury trial in June and pleaded guilty to tax charges in September. He was pardoned by his father in December.

Special counsel David Weiss, who initially oversaw the probe as the U.S. attorney for Delaware and received special counsel status in 2023 so he had clear authority to bring charges outside his home state, said the president’s criticism of the investigation “undermine[s] the public’s confidence in our criminal justice system.”

He also sharply denounced the elder Biden for condemning the Justice Department’s investigation when he issued the sweeping pardon of his son.

“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,” the special counsel report says.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report, which Attorney General Merrick Garland submitted to Congress on Monday afternoon before releasing it to the public.

In a statement, Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell criticized Weiss for a failed plea agreement in 2023 and for pursuing allegations about Hunter Biden by an informant that later proved false and led to additional charges against the informant.

“What is clear from this report is that the investigation into Hunter Biden is a cautionary tale of the abuse of prosecutorial power,” Lowell said.

Hunter Biden and those around him were long skeptical of Weiss and his team, casting them as heavy-handed and unfair to the president’s son, a favorite target of congressional Republicans and Trump.

For much of his presidency, Joe Biden avoided such rhetoric, attempting to make good on a vow to respect Justice Department independence. But more recently, when issuing the pardon, he adopted the language of his son’s legal team in bluntly saying that he had been wrongly prosecuted.

The long-running investigation, and the two indictments it yielded, revealed an ugly and personal chapter in the Biden family, during which Hunter was in the throes of addiction after his brother, Beau, died of brain cancer in 2015.

Weiss used the report to defend the charges he brought, which included lying on a gun purchase form and failing to pay taxes.

When assessing whether to charge someone with tax crimes, Weiss said, prosecutors often consider whether doing so would deter people from evading taxes in the future. He said Biden failed to pay at least $1.4 million in federal taxes from 2016 through 2019, a period that included time when he was sober and knew that what he was doing was wrong.

“Mr. Biden failed to timely file and pay his taxes over a four-year period and then, after becoming sober, he chose to file false returns to evade payment of taxes he owed,” Weiss wrote in the report. “I concluded that the prospect of criminal penalties was necessary to accomplish the goals of both specific and general deterrence in this case.”

In reference to the gun charges, Weiss said members of the public are regularly prosecuted for similar offenses. Biden was charged with lying about his drug use on a federal form when purchasing a firearm and then illegally owning that firearm.

While those charges are usually brought in connection with more serious violations, not as stand-alone counts, Weiss said they are among the “most frequently charged” of the 86 different federal gun crimes listed in a Justice Department analysis.

In addition to prosecuting Biden, Weiss also secured the conviction of Alexander Smirnov, an FBI informant who pleaded guilty last month to lying to agents when falsely claiming a bribery scheme involving the president, his son and executives at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

Smirnov was sentenced Wednesday to six years in prison for that offense and additional tax charges brought by Weiss’s office.

The 27-page special counsel report—plus a lengthy appendix—contained few details not previously revealed in courtrooms and filings. It did not discuss whether Weiss’s team had wanted to pursue any additional charges as part of its investigation.

When Biden pardoned his son, he removed any punishment for the convictions and said the younger Biden could not be prosecuted for any potential crimes that occurred during an 11-year period. Weiss said in the report that it would therefore be inappropriate for him to discuss whether additional charges were warranted.

Prosecutors had previously indicated in court that they investigated Biden for potentially violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act in his business dealings abroad. The report does not include any details about the findings of that investigation and why they decided not to charge him.

Instead, Weiss spent a large portion of the report defending the independence of his investigation and slamming the Biden family for criticizing it. He said he and his team remained “impervious to political influence at all times,” noting that no judge has sided with Hunter Biden’s lawyers in their attempts to get the charges dismissed on the basis of selective prosecution.

At times, the report seemed to directly rebut comments the president made in pardoning Hunter, in which he said: “I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.”

“I recognize that reasonable minds may differ about the correctness of my decisions,” Weiss wrote. “What should not be questioned, however, is that these decisions were duly considered and made in good faith with fidelity to the Principles of Federal Prosecution. Far from selective, these prosecutions 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.”

Weiss also objected in his report to the arguments from Hunter Biden’s defense team that most of the crimes occurred while he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

“Nor can Mr. Biden’s conduct be explained away by his drug use—most glaringly, Mr. Biden 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,” he wrote.

The special counsel pointed to previous statements from the White House expressing confidence in an independent Justice Department, as well as claims from Biden after his son was convicted that he would not issue a pardon and would abide by the jury’s decision.

“These remarks stand in stark contrast to the President’s recent assertion that the jury’s verdict and Mr. Biden’s admission of guilt amounted to a ‘miscarriage of justice,’” Weiss wrote.

“Politicians who attack the decisions of career prosecutors as politically motivated when they disagree with the outcome of a case undermine the public’s confidence in our criminal justice system,” Weiss added. “The President’s statements unfairly impugn the integrity not only of Department of Justice personnel, but all of the public servants making these difficult decisions in good faith.”


Jeremy Roebuck contributed to this report.