Barr ‘kept Biden inquiries quiet’
US Attorney-General William Barr defied intense pressure from President Donald Trump to make any investigations into Hunter Biden public during the election campaign, it has emerged.
Trump was desperate for Barr to announce an investigation into the business dealings of his Democrat rival Joe Biden’s son, believing it would help him to victory. He was unaware that two branches of the Justice Department, which is led by the attorney-general, were already investigating, and that Barr kept the inquiries covert for fear of influencing the campaign.
The revelation confounds the impression of an attorney-general eager to wield his power to the president’s benefit.
Hunter Biden, an investor, lawyer and lobbyist who has struggled with drug and alcohol addictions, said this week he had received a subpoena as part of an investigation into his tax affairs. According to The Wall Street Journal, it is only one part of a disparate set of investigations into Joe Biden’s second and only surviving son.
The one made public by Hunter Biden began in 2018, and is being led by federal prosecutors in Delaware. They are investigating tax issues related to his work in China. He is also said to be implicated in a broader ‘‘international financial investigation’’ that has been carried out by federal prosecutors in Manhattan for at least a year.
Barr, who was also President George H W Bush’s attorney-general, is said to have known about both investigations since the northern spring or earlier.
The US Supreme Court yesterday rejected a lawsuit backed by Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, ending a desperate attempt to get legal issues rejected by state and federal judges before the nation’s highest court.
The court’s order was its second this week rebuffing Republican requests that it get involved in the 2020 election outcome and overturn the will of voters as expressed in an election regarded by both Republican and Democratic officials as free and fair.
The Electoral College will meet on Tuesday to formally elect Biden as the next president.
Trump had called the lawsuit filed by Texas against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin ‘‘the big one’’ that would end with the Supreme Court undoing Biden’s substantial Electoral College majority. The court said Texas did not have the legal right to sue those states.
Eighteen other states won by Trump in last month’s election, 126 Republican members of Congress and Trump himself joined Texas in calling on the Supreme Court to take up the case, which sought to stop electors from casting their votes for Biden.
Republican support for the lawsuit and its call to throw out millions of votes in four battleground states, based on baseless claims of fraud, was an extraordinary display of the party’s willingness to subvert the will of voters.
The conservative-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed yesterday to hear arguments over the weekend on Trump’s state lawsuit seeking to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots and overturn his loss to Biden in the battleground state. The court’s decision came hours after a lower court ruled against Trump, saying there was nothing illegal about the election or subsequent recount in the state’s two largest counties.