Special counsel report on Hunter Biden rebukes president’s criticism of case

David C. Weiss, the special counsel who spent years investigating Hunter Biden, criticized President Biden for making “baseless claims” about his probe in his final report released Monday. charges” that threaten the “integrity of the entire justice system.”
“The president’s characterizations are incorrect based on the facts of this case, and on a more fundamental level, they are wrong,” Mr. Weiss wrote.
His investigation had been the subject of fierce debate until the president issued a broad pardon, ending the case against his son and saying the prosecution was the result of “raw politics.”
Last June, a jury in Wilmington, Delaware, found Hunter Biden guilty of three felonies for lying on a federal firearms application. He also pleaded guilty in September to nine federal tax charges in Los Angeles for falsifying records and failing to file tax returns. His tax crimes spanned both the time he was addicted to cocaine and after he sobered up.
In his report, Weiss pushed back against criticism, mostly from Democrats, that the case against Biden is baseless or politically motivated.
The report is a sharp rebuttal of the president. Weiss cited judicial rulings that the case was fairly filed and used his final words on the long-running investigation to defend his work and condemn the president’s characterization.
“Politicians’ decisions to attack career prosecutors when they disagree with the outcome of a case are politically motivated and undermine public confidence in our criminal justice system,” Mr. Weiss’ report said. “The president’s comments unfairly cast doubt on “The integrity of those in the Department of Justice also calls into question the integrity of all public servants who make these difficult decisions in good faith.”
Past special prosecutors have released thick reports that span hundreds of pages. Technically, Mr. Weiss’s final filing is more than 200 pages long, but the vast majority of it is an addendum containing previously unsealed court documents. The actual findings of Mr. Weiss’s report are contained in a brief 27 pages.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An attorney for Hunter Biden criticized the special counsel’s investigation.
“Like all of his court documents, David Weiss’s 27-page report continues to ignore some of the major mysteries of his seven-year investigation,” attorney Abbe Lowell said, adding Adding, “What is clear from this report is that Hunter Biden is a cautionary tale about the abuse of prosecutorial power.”
The release comes amid a more contentious 11th-hour legal battle over the report by special counsel Jack Smith, who made two claims against Donald J. Trump indictments, both of which failed due to Mr. Trump’s 2024 election.
Weiss began serving as special counsel after years of investigating Hunter Biden over tax, financial and foreign lobbying issues. The two sides briefly reached a plea deal, but the unusual nature of the agreement — coupled with the government’s reluctance to commit that the investigation would end with the agreement — caused it to collapse in July 2023.
The failed plea led Weiss to seek and obtain the appointment of a special prosecutor, allowing him to prosecute the president’s son in two jurisdictions – involving lies on gun purchase forms in Delaware, and tax charges in Los Angeles.
Biden pardoned his son in December while awaiting sentencing in two cases. The president not only cleared him of his conviction but also granted him a blanket pardon for crimes he may have committed over more than a decade.
In doing so, the president suggested that his son’s case had been politically influenced, a suggestion that angered Weiss and the Justice Department, especially since the president had insisted for years that the case was being handled independently.
The report said that Weiss did not draw conclusions about the possibility that Hunter Biden committed other crimes because the presidential pardon effectively precluded any such analysis.
Biden Jr.’s legal team has long argued that the criminal charges are baseless, in part because he was in the throes of a drug addiction during a disputed period. They also believe that similar conduct by others generally would not result in federal charges, making Hunter Biden an opportunity for Republicans to strongly arm the Justice Department in pursuing criminal cases.
Weiss said the prosecution was based on facts and law.
“I considered his struggle with drug addiction and his choice to file false returns while sober,” the special prosecutor wrote. “While Mr. Biden may have entered into loan agreements with personal friends who paid taxes for him, there is no evidence that Mr. Biden repaid any of those funds.”
Weiss also prosecuted another man, Alexander Smirnov, for lying to the FBI during the 2020 election about knowledge of the father and son’s corrupt payments, and won a guilty plea from him. Longtime FBI informant Smirnov has claimed that executives at Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid $5 million each to Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Hunter Biden around 2015 – Congressional Republicans The accusation was trumpeted.