WASHINGTON (AP) — The criminal charges against Hunter Biden “were the culmination of thorough, impartial investigations and nonpartisan politics,” the prosecutor who led the investigation said in a report released Monday that sharply criticized President Joe Biden for for denigrating the Justice Department when he pardoned his son.
“Other presidents have pardoned family members, but none have used the opportunity to vilify Justice Department officials based solely on false accusations,” said the report by special counsel David Weiss, whose team filed the gun and tax allegations against the younger Biden, which resulted in felony convictions that were subsequently wiped out by a presidential pardon.
The report is the culmination of years of investigations that predated the arrival of Attorney General Merrick Garland but became the most politically charged investigations of his entire term, arousing Republican fascination on Capitol Hill and ultimately leading to a split between the Justice Department and the White House about the treatment of the president’s son.
The document provides a summary of the investigation’s findings, as is typical for reports from special prosecutors at the Justice Department. Most notable, however, is the president’s steadfast defense of the team’s work and open criticism of a written statement he issued last month to mark his son’s pardon.
Biden had repeatedly promised not to pardon his son, but reversed course on Dec. 1, saying such an action was justified because of what he called a “miscarriage of justice” and selective prosecution. He said he believes his son was treated “differently” because of his last name and that “crude politics” influenced the Justice Department’s decision-making.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can come to any conclusion other than that Hunter was chosen simply because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Biden said.
Weiss, who served as U.S. attorney for Delaware during the Trump administration and was retained in his position by Garland before being appointed special counsel in 2023, took issue with those comments, noting that the justices had also rejected that assessment .
“The President’s characterizations in this case are wrong based on the facts, and they are wrong at a more fundamental level,” Weiss wrote. Such statements undermine public trust in the justice system, Weiss said.
Questioning the judges’ rulings and imparting partisanship to independent law enforcement undermines the foundations of what makes the American justice system fair and just,” Weiss wrote. “It undermines public trust in an institution that is essential to upholding the rule of law.”
Hunter Biden’s lawyer criticized the report, saying Weiss failed to explain why prosecutors pursued “wild – and exposed – conspiracies” about the president’s son, dragging out the investigation.
“It is clear from this report that the Hunter Biden investigation is a cautionary tale of the abuse of prosecutorial power,” defense attorney Abbe Lowell said in a statement.
The investigation, which Hunter Biden himself revealed in 2020 when he disclosed that prosecutors were auditing his taxes, took an arduous path to resolution between Justice Department leaders from both political parties.
Hunter Biden was scheduled to plead guilty to tax crimes in 2023, but the deal collapsed spectacularly due to a last-minute disagreement between his lawyers and federal prosecutors. Last year, he went on trial in Delaware and was convicted of three federal felonies in which he was accused of lying on a mandatory gun purchase form by saying he had not used drugs illegally or had a drug addiction.
Weiss described the younger Biden as a “Yale-educated lawyer and businessman” and said the president’s son understood that he had lied when he filled out the federal form when he bought his gun in 2018, noting that he was not a drug user .
“But he did it anyway because he wanted to own a gun, even though he was actively using crack cocaine,” Weiss wrote.
Hunter Biden then made a surprise guilty plea to federal tax charges last September, avoiding a trial that would have presented potentially lurid evidence in addition to the salacious and unflattering details about his personal life that were revealed during his earlier trial in Delaware.
Weiss said Hunter “consciously and willfully chose” not to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes over four years.
The president’s claims that Hunter Biden was mistreated by the criminal justice system in some ways mirrored the arguments of the younger Biden’s legal team, which had claimed that prosecutors had bowed to political pressure to charge Hunter after the collapse of what Donald Trump and other Republicans as a “sweetheart” plea deal.
Not like that, said Weiss.
“Far from being selective, these prosecutions embodied 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 said.
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Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Colleen Long and Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.
