No special counsel for Hunter: Barr
Says current probe is enough
The Justice Department has no reason to appoint a special counsel to investigate President-elect Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, Attorney General William Barr said Monday.
“I think to the extent that there’s an investigation, I think that it’s being handled responsibly and professionally currently within the department, and to this point, I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel and I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Barr said at a press conference,
Asked if he was concerned that the Biden administration would end the Hunter Biden probe, Barr said, “I’m hoping that the next administration handles that matter responsibly.”
Barr’s last day on the job is Wednesday. Deputy Attorney General Jeffery Rosen will become the acting attorney general.
Hunter Biden, 50, whose lucrative overseas business relationships drew scrutiny during the presidential campaign, confirmed this month that he’s under federal investigation for possible tax fraud.
The probe “involves multiple US attorney offices and FBI field offices,” sources told The Associated Press last week.
The attorney general has the power to appoint special counsels, who, as a means of insulating the office from political pressure, cannot be fired without a finding of misconduct.
President Trump’s allies want a special counsel to begin reviewing the Hunter Biden case while Trump is still in office so that a Joe Biden-nominated attorney general and Biden-nominated US attorneys can’t quash the investigation.
Documents from a Hunter Biden hard drive that were published in October by The Post appear to link the president-elect to his son’s business relationships in China and Ukraine.
Rosen said last week he would continue “to do things on the merits and to do things on the basis of the law and the facts. That’s how I thought about it from the beginning, and that’s how I’ll think about it through the end.”
Many details about Hunter Biden’s overseas work remain murky. For example, a September report from Senate Republicans said he received $3.5 million from Elena Baturina, the widow of former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov. Senators said they did not know the purpose of the payment.
In the first presidential debate, Joe Biden said it was “not true” that Hunter received that money.
Barr in October secretly made Connecticut US Attorney John Durham a special counsel so that he can complete his review of alleged FBI misconduct preceding special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which found no evidence that Trump conspired with Russia in 2016, as claimed by Democrats.