Imagine that President Biden summoned Attorney General Merrick Garland to the White House and told him the following: My son Hunter did nothing wrong and Donald Trump should be prosecuted for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Now get to work.
Washington would explode amid charges Biden was corrupting the Department of Justice to protect his son and prosecute his political rival. Even Democrats who are hoping for those outcomes would be embarrassed the president was so straightforward in giving Garland marching orders.
In fact, Biden didn’t actually summon Garland and say those things directly. Instead, he publicly expressed exactly the same two points through his staff and the media.
No meeting was needed for Garland to get the message as the president made it clear where he stands on pending cases.
In doing so, Biden breached his promised independence of Justice in a round-about fashion by having others reveal his thinking. Yet nary a peep of protest is heard. Imagine if Trump …
Both Biden messages were delivered on Sunday. One came from his chief of staff, Ron Klain, in a TV interview, and the other came from anonymous White House aides who talked to The New York Times.
The beauty of the indirect delivery system is that Biden and Garland can claim they never spoke about either case, although Garland knows what his boss wants.
That’s what passes for integrity in Washington.
Klain’s interview was brazen in the way he made two points. “Of course the president’s confident that his son didn’t break the law,” Klain told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
Pressed about ethical lines and the millions of dollars the Biden family got from a Chinese energy chief among others, Klain insisted, “The president is confident that his family did the right thing.”
Hypocrisy
Did you get that, Mr. Attorney General? Hunter and Joe’s brother Jim Biden broke no laws and didn’t cross any ethical boundaries. So call off the dogs.
Naturally, Klain added the window dressing that the final decision about the case would be up to the Justice Department. Hypocrisy requires appearances of appropriate behavior.
Indeed, Klain said all this while insisting that “Only Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, in the modern era, believed that prosecution decisions should be made in the Oval Office, not in the Justice Department.”
Give the man credit for keeping a straight face while accusing others of doing the very thing he was doing himself!
Much attention has been focused on something else Klain said to Stephanopoulos, namely that whatever Hunter and Jim Biden did “are private matters. They don’t involve the president.”
That sounds like a fallback position designed to protect Joe Biden, even at the expense of his son and brother. Perhaps, but it’s also possible prosecutors would see that line as another warning to go easy on Hunter and Jim Biden.
That’s because any honest prosecution of their influence-peddling schemes would necessarily touch on the help that Joe Biden provided. Beyond the notorious reference to Joe as the “big guy” getting a secret cut of 10% in the lucrative deal with a Chinese firm, Hunter’s abandoned laptop is littered with evidence of Joe’s meetings and photo-ops with the foreign paymasters, primarily when he was vice president.
It is reasonable to see Joe’s role as confirming he was in on the deals and would deliver the influence his family had sold for extravagant sums. So for prosecutors to go there could endanger the president.
As I wrote Sunday, Garland is indeed in a very tough spot. He inherited the…
Read More: Biden isn’t actually pressuring Merrick Garland? You’re Joe-king