Editors at the Washington Examiner question the wisdom of appointing David Weiss as special counsel in the ongoing Hunter Biden case.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of U.S. Attorney David Weiss as special counsel in the Biden family investigation has become an insult to the public. Garland should replace Weiss with somebody fit for the job.
Weiss was an outlandish choice from the start, but new revelations make it look even worse. By law, logic, Garland’s earlier claims about Weiss’s authority, and Weiss’s performance, he isn’t a reasonable option.
By law, Weiss isn’t even eligible for the post. Special counsel regulations explicitly say the appointee “shall be selected from outside the United States Government,” which is important to guarantee necessary independence for the job. Weiss is a government employee. A special counsel should focus only on the case to which his appointment applies, but Weiss will continue acting as U.S. attorney for Delaware, so he will be distracted by other duties.
On its face, meanwhile, Weiss’s appointment is illogical and self-contradictory. It is illogical because it defeats one of the biggest reasons a special counsel is needed, which is that a full review is necessary of why charges against Hunter Biden took inordinately long to be levied and why they were so lenient. A special counsel is therefore needed to review Weiss’s work. This appointment means Weiss will be reviewing his own conduct, which could not be a more obvious conflict of interest.
The appointment is also self-contradictory because, in practice, the only major power Weiss picks up is one he and Garland said he already had. Usually, a U.S. attorney has the authority to bring charges only in his jurisdiction (in this case, Delaware). Whistleblowers have testified that Weiss was blocked from bringing charges in California and Washington, D.C., but Garland and Weiss said Weiss enjoyed cross-jurisdictional authority if he wanted. Yet now, Garland names Weiss as special counsel to give him cross-jurisdictional authority. Does that mean Garland and Weiss were prevaricating earlier?
Those important but somewhat legalistic objections to Weiss fade in comparison to the significance of his failure to apply evenhanded justice for five years.
