Leaks Illuminate Biden Investigation

A considerable number of emails and other documents have been leaked to Politico and the New York Times; I take it that these are the same materials, although this may not be entirely clear. And insiders have leaked off the record to both of these organizations. In their articles, the two news organizations highlight different elements of the documents.

One of Politico’s most interesting revelations is that the Biden Department of Justice had been willing to let Hunter Biden off the hook without pleading guilty to anything, until IRS whistleblowers approached Congress:

[O]ne of Biden’s lawyers sent another draft pretrial diversion agreement addressing both the gun and tax issues. It was still quite similar to their first. It also incorporated Wolf’s must-haves, and it guaranteed Biden the same broad protection from prosecution for anything the Justice Department had investigated up to that point. It also guaranteed that the department would move to dismiss all charges if Biden upheld his end of the deal — no guilty plea necessary.

Five days later, on May 24, Gary Shapley — the IRS investigator who had supervised the Biden probe, and whose congressional outreach sparked the Wall Street Journal story — went public in an interview with CBS News and said the Justice Department had “slow-walked” the investigation.
***
Within days of the interview airing, Justice Department prosecutors made clear to Biden’s lawyers that the deal would have to change and that Biden would need to plead guilty to tax charges, according to two people familiar with the talks who were granted anonymity to share sensitive details.

Politico also highlights the fact that Hunter’s lawyers used the prospect of Joe Biden as a witness for the defense as a negotiating tool:

Then [Chris] Clark issued a warning: if the Justice Department charged the president’s son, his lawyers would put the president on the witness stand.

“President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial,” Clark wrote in a 32-page letter reviewed by POLITICO.

But to me, this is perhaps the most interesting tidbit in Politico’s reporting:

During the private negotiations with prosecutors, the documents show, Biden’s lawyers often invoked the case’s extraordinary political undercurrents. They made clear to prosecutors that they thought pressure from congressional Republicans was improperly shaping the investigation. They name-dropped Donald Trump, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and the failed prosecution of a lawyer for Hillary Clinton. They argued that bringing the case would destroy the Justice Department’s reputation.

That such an argument could be made, and apparently taken seriously both by the prosecutors and Politico’s reporters, suggests how deep in the Swamp all of these characters live. Do they seriously not understand that DOJ’s reputation is already in tatters, not because it has been too tough on poor Hunter Biden, but because it has become a partisan tool of the Democratic Party?

The Times account focuses heavily on the negotiation of Hunter’s plea deal and on how that agreement ultimately fell apart. The Times, too, emphasizes the political context of the investigation, with apparent sympathy for David Weiss and Hunter Biden:

Above all, this inside chronicle of the agreement vividly illustrates the difficulty of the task facing Justice Department officials like Mr. Weiss, who have been called upon to investigate prominent figures at a time of extreme polarization, when the nation’s political and criminal justice systems are intertwining in treacherous and unpredictable ways.

If only those pesky Congressional Republicans hadn’t taken an interest!

…Mr. Clark followed up with an even more dramatic gesture, reading a quote from a Supreme Court justice, Robert Jackson, who had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials: Prosecutors could always find “a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone” but should never succumb to pressure from the powerful.

The “powerful” being, I suppose, IRS whistleblowers and Senator Charles Grassley. What is striking to me is that these people don’t seem to realize that their facade is blown. Pretty much everyone understands that Joe Biden and his relatives netted at least $20 million in bribes from foreign interests, beginning when Biden was vice president, and that Biden’s own Department of Justice has gone to great lengths to draw a discreet curtain over Biden’s corruption, at least until he leaves office. Merrick Garland is presiding over one of history’s less successful cover-ups.