WASHINGTON – The nation’s top police officer insisted Friday that the Delaware prosecutor who indicted the president Joe BidenThe son of a tax offender had the power to file charges however he wanted.
“He was given complete authority to make all decisions on his own,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference.
A whistleblower previously claimed that the Garland Justice Department was making slow progress in an investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged failure to pay federal taxes.
Gary Shapley, a career IRS agent who oversees criminal investigations, told lawmakers on Capitol Hill in May that fbi officials resisted requests for injunctions and that David Weiss, the Delaware federal prosecutor overseeing the Hunter Biden case, said he could not bring charges in other states without permission from those states’ prosecutors.
According to Shapley, Weiss said he was “not the official who decided whether to file charges” against Hunter Biden in Washington, DC, and that he was also rejected in California.
Weiss finally filed gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden this week in Delaware and said the case is ongoing. The president’s son agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and enter a pretrial diversion program to avoid a felony weapons charge.
Garland maintained Friday that Weiss was, in fact, the deciding referee.
“As I stated at the outset, Mr. Weiss, who was appointed by President Trump as United States Attorney in Delaware and was assigned this matter during the previous administration, would be allowed to continue his investigation and make the decision to prosecute in any manner in in whichever district I wanted and in whichever district I wanted,” Garland said.
Garland noted that Weiss himself claimed he was in charge of his prosecution decisions in a letter to republicans earlier this month.
“I don’t know how someone could stop him from filing a prosecution, given that he has this authority,” Garland said, adding that Weiss never asked for special powers of attorney, as Shapley claimed.
Weiss’s office declined to comment Thursday and did not respond to a follow-up request Friday.
If Shapley’s account is correct, and Weiss believed he could not indict Hunter Biden outside of Delaware without the permission of US attorneys in those states, it would call into question Garland’s repeated statements to Congress that Weiss had via free to handle the case no matter how he saw it. fit.
Republicans have described Shapley’s testimony as further evidence of a “two-tier” justice system that persecutes Republicans and former President Donald Trump while indulging in Democrats.