Republicans leery of Hunter Biden special counsel appointee
After demanding Weiss lead probe, GOP backpedals
WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans have for months repeatedly written to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding he appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, the president’s son, over his business dealings.
Some even demanded that a specific man be named to lead the inquiry: David Weiss, the Donald Trump-appointed Delaware US attorney who has long investigated the case.
But Friday, after Garland elevated Weiss to special counsel status, Republicans in Congress reacted publicly not with triumph but outrage. “David Weiss can’t be trusted and this is just a new way to whitewash the Biden family’s corruption,” Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
The reaction was a notable political development, one that underscored both how Weiss, a Republican, has fallen in conservative circles and how deeply it has become ingrained in the GOP to oppose the Justice Department at every turn.
“The reality is this appointment is meant to distract from and slow down our investigations,” said Representative Jason Smith, the Missouri Republican who chairs Ways and Means, one of three congressional committees looking into the Biden family’s finances.
But in interviews, away from social media and television appearances, the reaction of many Republicans to Weiss’s appointment was more nuanced. Privately, some in the GOP were chalking up the development as a victory.
The party had worked for years to elevate the Hunter Biden case — which Democrats have long dismissed as a partisan obsession of the right — to a scandal equivalent to those dogging Trump, who has faced two impeachment trials, two special counsel investigations, and three indictments totaling 78 felony counts against him. Those indictments include charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and willfully retaining national defense information after he left office.
By contrast, Hunter Biden has thus far been accused of two misdemeanor crimes stemming from his failure to pay taxes on more than $1.5 million in income related to his overseas business deals, and one felony count of illegally possessing a firearm while being a drug user.
After leaving his job as a lobbyist while his father was running to become vice president more than a decade ago, Hunter Biden, a Yale-educated lawyer, and partners entered into a series of international business relationships, often with firms seeking influence and access within the United States. He was paid handsomely, even as he descended into drug addiction, and Republicans have accused him and his family of corruption. But they have not produced evidence that any of the overseas money went to Joe Biden or that the president influenced US policy to benefit his son’s business partners.
Even as they objected to Weiss, some Republicans said the appointment appeared to be an acknowledgment that the allegations they had made deserved a serious investigation. It promised to keep Hunter Biden’s misdeeds in the news — and in the courts — for longer than Democrats would like as the 2024 presidential election heats up. And it ensured that in the minds of some voters, the names Trump and Biden would both be linked to scandal.
In an interview with Newsmax, a top Trump adviser, Jason Miller, appeared to echo both sentiments and foreshadowed coming attacks.
Miller said the appointment of Weiss “stinks” and accused the prosecutor of sitting on his hands for years. But, he added, “I do want to make sure that my Republican brethren” don’t “lose sight of the big prize here.”
He described the appointment of a special counsel as “a direct acknowledgment that Hunter Biden did something wrong,” and he recalled Joe Biden saying in a 2020 debate with Trump that he had not done anything wrong.
For Democrats, the appointment of a special counsel was hardly a welcome development. Yet, many Democrats were sanguine about a dark moment in a summer of cautiously bright news for their president. In interviews, more than a dozen Democratic officials, operatives, and pollsters said Hunter Biden’s legal problems were less worrisome than their other concerns about the president: his age, his low approval ratings, and Americans’ lack of confidence in an improving economy.
Part of their sense of calm stems from a version of the what-aboutism often adopted by Republicans since Donald Trump’s rise: Biden’s son is under investigation, Democrats say, but across the aisle, the GOP front-runner has actually been criminally indicted — three times.
“I find it hard to imagine that anyone concerned about political corruption would turn to Donald Trump to address the problem of political corruption,” said Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which has been investigating Hunter Biden since Republicans took control of the chamber.
Democrats cited an array of reasons for whistling past the announcement that Weiss would be elevated to a special counsel.
Polling, Democrats noted, has suggested that swing voters aren’t attuned to the various Hunter Biden controversies. Recent elections, including the Ohio referendum this past week, have shown that the abortion rights issue is powering Democratic victories. And Democrats believe ne’er-do-well family members do not cause transitive harm to relatives who are running for president.