David Weiss’s Shot across the Bow at Hunter Is an Indictment of His Investigation

A stellar report by our James Lynch details that political-corruption allegations are certain to factor into the tax case against Hunter Biden. Specifically, Biden DOJ “special counsel” David Weiss plans to prove the machinations by which the president’s son lobbied the Obama administration on behalf of a corrupt Romanian businessman, even as his father, then–vice president Joe Biden, posed as the administration’s point-man on anti-corruption efforts in Europe.

The tax case is scheduled to go to trial on September 5 in Los Angeles federal court before Judge Mark Scarsi, a Trump appointee.

Weiss’s disclosure is obviously a shot across the bow that puts pressure on the younger Biden to plead guilty — as was Weiss’s recent move to force testimony at the upcoming trial from Hallie Biden, Hunter’s sister-in-law and former paramour (who testified during Hunter’s last trial — at which a jury found him guilty on gun charges — that he got her hooked on crack). Besides underscoring that the proof against Hunter is daunting and that his defense of cocaine-fueled incapacity is laughable, Weiss’s plan to prove millions in payments from the Romanian, Gabriel Popoviciu, signals that the public trial would spotlight corruption. This would humiliate the president and Democrats, and derivatively the Harris–Walz campaign.

Still, the disclosure also speaks volumes about the corruption of the Justice Department’s Biden investigation, led by Weiss — who was designated a special counsel despite Attorney General Merrick Garland’s non-compliance with DOJ conflict-of-interest regulations for such appointees, and who filed tax and firearms indictments only after dutifully trying to disappear the cases against the president’s son in a sweetheart plea deal.

As James’s report notes, Weiss’s court submission on the Romanian corruption evidence acknowledges that prosecutors will not accuse Hunter of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. That is because Weiss willfully allowed the five-year statute of limitations for FARA crimes to expire before finally indicting Hunter after the plea bargain imploded. Hunter’s work on behalf of Popoviciu was well known years ago. The payments to Hunter from Popoviciu started in 2015 and ended in May 2017 — i.e., shortly after Joe Biden’s term as vice president ended. But Weiss waited to file charges until December 2023.

I wrote about the Romanian scheme a little over a year ago. It was a model of how the lucrative Biden family influence-peddling business worked: Vice President Biden would emote as the global scourge of political corruption while his son and their associates cashed in with oligarchs targeted by the governments that the elder Biden was hectoring. Summarizing revelations from a House Oversight Committee report, I outlined how the Bidens’ Romanian scheme mirrored their Ukrainian scheme:

In 2014 and 2015, when not railing at officials in Kyiv about corruption, [Vice President Biden] was railing at officials in Bucharest about corruption. At the time, one of their most high-profile corruption targets was Gabriel Popoviciu, a real-estate tycoon ultimately convicted of paying a bribe to acquire a highly desirable lot at a bargain price. While Vice President Biden pressured Romania to ratchet up anti-corruption prosecutions, Popoviciu paid Hunter Biden to use his connections to fend off the Romanian prosecutors.

As the committee documents, the payments were structured to conceal the fact that they were coming from Popoviciu: multiple payments over time by the Romanian tycoon’s business (Bladon Enterprises Limited) to the Bidens’ business partner, Rob Walker. Because smaller money transfers draw less regulatory attention, Walker parceled out Popoviciu’s transfers into smaller payments and doled them out, over time, to various Hunter Biden accounts and accounts of business associates, and even sent $10,000 to an account of Hallie Biden — Beau Biden’s widow with whom Hunter was romantically involved. All in the family.

Amazing how this works: After the vice president congratulated President Klaus Iohannis on the strides Romania was making to crack down on corruption, Hunter stepped up efforts for Popoviciu — the incumbent vice president’s son using his contacts to beseech State Department officials to help a Romanian corruption target’s lawyers get a meeting with Romanian anti-corruption prosecutors. In the midst of the payments from Popoviciu detailed by the committee (which stretched from November 2015 through the end of his father’s term in office), Hunter wrote in one email on behalf of his Romanian client, “He is in my estimation a very good man that’s being very badly treated by a suspect Romanian justice system.” (Emphasis added.)

I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that the Romanian courts didn’t see it that way, upholding Popoviciu’s nine-year prison sentence.

The Romanian scheme occurred during the same time frame as the Bidens’ Ukrainian wheeling and dealing. On that one, Hunter brought in his Clinton-connected consultant friends at Blue Star Strategies to help lobby the Obama–Biden administration on behalf of Mykola (Nikolai) Zlochevsky, the corrupt Ukrainian energy tycoon. While Hunter cashed in with the oligarch, his veep-father first pressured Kyiv to do more on anti-corruption efforts and later pressured Kyiv to fire the prosecutor who was running the anti-corruption probe of Zlochevsky.

As I related last year, though, a FARA case against Hunter for trading on his father’s influence on behalf of corrupt oligarchs would have torpedoed President Biden’s (since abandoned) reelection campaign; hence, Weiss and Garland let it die a slow statute-of-limitations death:

The [media] speculation that Hunter Biden may be charged under FARA is understandable given how it weirdly factored into the collapse of the plea deal. But there has been surprisingly little attention paid to one of Weiss’s most critical but furtive decisions in the case.

Last year, Weiss dropped the FARA investigation of Blue Star Strategies. That would be the Clinton-allied Democratic lobbying firm that Hunter recruited to lobby for Burisma and its chief, Mykola Zlochevsky. That would be the same Zlochevsky who lavishly paid Hunter to sit on the energy company’s board, who told an FBI informant he had paid Hunter and Joe Biden a combined $10 million in bribes, and whom Hunter put on the phone with his dad, then-vice president Joe Biden, in late 2015 — while Zlochevsky was a fugitive living in exile in Dubai and was pressuring Hunter to use his political connections to pressure the Ukrainian government to drop its Burisma investigation. That was just days before Vice President Biden started pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.

Weiss quietly aborted the Blue Star Strategies probe in exchange for the lobbying firm’s being quietly permitted to file a post hoc FARA registration detailing its Burisma exertions — an implicit admission that the law called for registering with the Justice Department at the time of those exertions.

Obviously, if Weiss had any intention of proceeding with FARA charges against Hunter Biden, he would not have opted against charging the lobbyist that Hunter had brought in to do Burisma’s bidding. And at this point, of course, the statute of limitations on 2015–16 FARA violations has expired in any event.

There is no way David Weiss is going to charge Hunter Biden with criminal offenses that implicate Joe Biden. Remember, Weiss wouldn’t even mention any such potential charges in the immunity provision that he tried to hide from Judge [Maryellen] Noreika by inserting it into the diversion agreement (which did not require judicial approval) rather than the plea agreement where it belonged. And, given the determination of Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland to protect President Biden with the 2024 campaign already underway, there is no way that the Biden Justice Department is going to charge that the president’s son has been an agent of corrupt Ukrainians, Chinese apparatchiks, a Russian oligarch, or who knows who else.

That is the way it played out. Again, Weiss would not even have indicted Hunter for tax felonies if he could have gotten away with it — i.e., if Hunter’s then-lawyers had not foolishly blown up the plea agreement. (How they snatched defeat from the jaws of the victory Weiss was trying to give them was the main subject of my just-excerpted column.) There was no way on God’s green earth that the Biden–Harris Justice Department was going to indict the son of President Biden for lobbying the Obama–Biden administration on behalf of a corrupt Ukrainian while then-vice president Biden squeezed the government in Kyiv to fire the prosecutor who was investigating the corrupt Ukrainian.

So David Weiss did what he has done for most of six years of running the Biden investigation. He did nothing.