At National Review Online, conservative legal scholars John Yoo and John Shu have an article calling for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the allegations swirling around Hunter Biden and, by extension, President Joe Biden. They opine that the credibility of the Justice Department is at stake:
If [Attorney General Merrick] Garland does not quickly appoint a special counsel, he will be opening himself up to the charge that the DOJ is protecting President Biden. Garland would also give Congress the grounds to believe that genuinely investigating and prosecuting Hunter would have revealed that President Biden and/or his family members either committed or knew of serious wrongdoing. Failure to appoint a special counsel would give Congress the grounds to consider measures beyond oversight hearings.
I have two comments on this. The first is that a special counsel would not be an independent actor. Though a special counsel cannot be a DOJ employee, he or she would still be answerable to the attorney general. It may be true that the AG’s ability to meddle in the investigation would be limited for fear of adverse publicity. But the special counsel’s freedom of action would be similarly limited for fear of a clash with the boss. These considerations seem beside the point, however, for my second point is that the DOJ obviously has been protecting Joe Biden. Merrick Garland & Co. have already shredded the DOJ’s credibility, and it can’t be salvaged now by the appointment of a special counsel.
Such an appointment would look like a dodge, enabling White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and other Biden Administration flacks to deflect awkward questions about the Bidens’ misdoings on the excuse that there’s an ongoing investigation. With the 2024 election looming, that won’t work to shore up the DOJ’s image. Indeed, it would have the opposite effect.
Last week’s theater of the absurd in a Delaware courtroom, where Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal went down in flames, supplied all the information necessary to conclude that Merrick Garland is a partisan hack who runs the Department of Justice as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Biden family business. No other American charged with equally serious crimes would have received such consideration at the hands of federal prosecutors. That is a fact. And it’s not just because he’s the son of a sitting president. Yesterday’s congressional testimony by Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business associate, made plain that Joe Biden was lying to us when he insisted, over and over, that he had no involvement in, nor knowledge of, his son’s business dealings. He did. And that involvement consisted of the lowest, most oafish form of influence peddling.
It is, therefore, obvious that the DOJ’s gentle treatment of the son was primarily intended to shield the father.
All this is a gift from on high—or from precincts below—to President Biden’s probable 2024 opponent, former President Trump. The familiar MAGA charge that there exists in America a two-tier justice system, one for progressive elites and another for everybody else, has just been given a substantial boost. Literally no other American would have been offered the plea deal that the DOJ just offered to Hunter Biden. And no Republican president so close to such shady dealings would be receiving a pass from the mainstream, which is to say the Democratic/progressive, media. It’s almost comical to see the lengths to which outlets like CBS and the New York Times have gone to unsee the sordid details of this burgeoning scandal. Even now they’re barely covering it.
The excuse for all this moral corruption is a claim, never voiced but well understood, is that even a decrepit, incompetent, stupid and corrupt old man like Joe Biden is preferable to a monster of evil like Donald Trump. I might agree with that claim if Biden really were the only alternative to Trump. But that surely is not the case. (Ironically, Trump supporters make the same dubious claim on his behalf: that he’s the only alternative to Biden.) There are other people in the Democratic Party who could step in if Biden bowed out—or was forced out. I can only surmise that Democrats fear ditching Biden because they agree with him that nobody else could beat Trump. Six months ago, that looked plausible. Now it doesn’t. The most recent New York Times/Siena College poll has Biden and Trump tied at 43% each. That’s dangerous territory for an incumbent dogged by an ugly scandal and stuck with a 39% approval rating. And that’s against Trump. Where would Biden be against some other Republican, say, Tim Scott?
To prevent the Hunter Biden scandal from adding to President Biden’s travails was Merrick Garland’s number-one mission, and he blew it. Appointing a special counsel now would merely underline his hackery and that of the DOJ. The political fallout from this mess is, admittedly, hard to gauge: Trump has his own legal problems, which are about to get worse. But the damage done to the Department of Justice—a key institution of the federal government—is inarguable.
As long as Joe Biden remains president and Merrick Garland remains his attorney general, the American people have every reason to doubt that equal justice under law, in principle or in practice, is being upheld by their national government. Institutional credibility is a hard-won asset, built up over decades. But it’s all too easily squandered, as we see in this instance.