The Attorney General Names A Special Prosecutor

Since I'm old enough to have lived through Watergate as an adult and followed it closely, I find a certain amount of déjà vu in Attorney General Garland's announcement that he had given Delaware US Attorney David Weiss special counsel authority in the Hunter Biden investigation. According to the New York Post,

Garland’s announcement came 10 months and four days after Weiss allegedly told officials from the FBI and IRS that he lacked authority to charge the first son, now 53, outside of Delaware.

The attorney general took no questions following his statement, ignoring a reporter who asked why Weiss had been elevated to special counsel if he had “ultimate authority” to prosecute, as Garland claimed in sworn congressional testimony earlier this year.

This comes in the context of new developments in the Hunter Biden case:

Court papers revealed Friday the president’s son Hunter Biden’s tax and gun crimes case will now likely go to trial, with negotiations over a new sweetheart plea deal appearing to collapse.

The case will likely now be moved out of Delaware. The court papers indicated a plea deal had reached an “impasse” and the case is headed toward trial.

. . . “After the hearing, the parties continued negotiating but reached an impasse. A trial is therefore in order,” prosecutors said in their Friday filing, the NBC News report sets out.

Elizabeth Stauffer writes at Power Line:

Sources told Sean Hannity that President Joe Biden is said to be “distraught” over the spectacular collapse of his son’s sweetheart deal. Of course he is. What parent wouldn’t be?

But he is also upset for himself. . . . Despite the Left’s insistence that this is a Hunter Biden story, mounting evidence shows that Joe Biden is inextricably linked to his son’s unsavory foreign business dealings.

It’s also a Justice Department story. Judge Maryellen Noreika’s refusal to rubber stamp the agreement exposed the weaponization of the DOJ for the world to see.

. . . There’s no question that prosecutors were more interested in protecting the Bidens than in pursuing actual justice. Rather than following the law in this case, they looked for a path to a predetermined outcome.

Their actions may open up DOJ prosecutors and those up the chain of command, including Attorney General Merrick Garland himself, to obstruction of justice charges.

This unavoidably takes me back to Watergate and Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, whose photo is at the top of this post. Cox has little in common with David Weiss except that both found themselves in the middle of a major scandal, but it's likely that Weiss will wind up little better off than Cox. But Nixon, who was forced to accept Cox's appointment as the cost of Senate confirmation for Elliot Richardson, his choice for attorney general, understood that Cox was his enemy from the start, while it appears that Weiss is in his job to continue covering for the Bidens.

The Wikipedia entries on Archibald Cox and the Saturday Night Massacre of October 20, 1973 suggest the extreme sensitivity of special prosecutors' positions during a constitutional crisis, which it looks like the Biden cases will also become. But just so far, there are intriguing historical parallels.

Nixon fired Cox as apecial prosecutor that October 20 in the wake of a guilty plea by former White House counsel John Dean on October 19, which included an agreement to cooperate with prosecutors. Dean subsequently testified in the trials of Watergate conspirators Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson. It's likely that with Dean's guilty plea, which in fact resulted in his receiving extremely lenient treatment in his sentencing, Nixon sensed the game was up and had little choice but to fire Cox, although this only delayed his own departure.

It's beginning to look like the failure of Hunter's attempted guilty plea in Delaware in exchange for equivalent lenient treatment is setting potentially similar processes in motion for Joe Biden, but they'll result not from firing a special prosecutor but from naming one. In the case of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, firing Cox had the opposite effect of what was intended, while Garland's naming Weiss to the same position may or may not have a similar effect. Nevertheless, on one hand, we see the press asking why Garland felt the need to name Weiss special prosecutor if Garland had already claimed Weiss already had such authority, while Hunter's lawyer Abbe Lowell has now effectively said the same thing:

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Source,” Hunter Biden attorney Abbe Lowell stated that David Weiss has no more power as a special counsel than he did before and noted that both Attorney General Merrick Garland and Weiss himself “have said for weeks, months, that he had all the authority he needed to bring any charge that was merited, at any time that was appropriate, in any place that made sense. … So, from a practical point of view, nothing really changed.”

Mr Lowell has an intriguing take on how the negotiations changed:

Later, Lowell added that the failure to reach plea bargain showed there was “a disagreement” over what the plea deal meant. . . . It could be that somehow the prosecutors thought they were making a statement that they turned out either not to be accurate about or not to be specific about. Or it could be, as you saw in court, that they seemed to be changing their position as the proceedings went along.”

In effect, Mr Lowell, who is neither a naif nor a novice to such processes, is accusing Weiss and Garland of bad faith in not quite so many words. What's changed? Interesting question. It isn't a good sign, though, that parties -- indeed, a father and son tacitly coordinating through proxies -- who were up to now thought to have been working in covert harmony are now in public disagreement.

There may even turn out to be parallels between John Dean and Hunter Biden. Is Hunter mad enough at the Delaware deal falling through to decide he's not going to take the fall for Joe? I'm starting to wonder if more was involved in the Delaware deal than we've so far learned, and Hunter may not want to risk going to prison just to cover up for Joe and the rest of the family. At least, that's what I might read into Mr Lowell's remarks.