The Investigation That Never Ended

The U.S. Department of Justice seal on the stage at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, on Dec. 5, 2019. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Commentary

For months, I’ve watched pundits in numerous media—both left and right—assert that the federal probe into Hunter Biden and his business associates ended shortly after Joseph R. Biden was sworn in as our nation’s 46th president.

Then Politico dropped a bombshell saying it had been handed by a confidential source when it published a report on July 16 about how the U.S. Attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, may have suddenly started issuing search warrants in the Hunter Biden criminal investigation. And that wasn’t all.

It turned out that Weiss had also seated a federal grand jury for the probe, and this grand jury had proceeded to issue a flurry of subpoenas.

But how can this be?

It was widely assumed in almost all quarters of the U.S. news media that upon being sworn in to their offices, one of the first items of business for new President Biden and his new Attorney General Merrick Garland was to order the shutting down of the federal criminal investigation into Hunter Biden.

These confident assertions were always utter nonsense.

Try to imagine the controversy that would have immediately descended upon Washington had it been discovered that Attorney Generals Jeff Sessions or William Barr had dared to give orders to a U.S. attorney or a special counsel to shut down a federal investigation of a Trump family member or associate.

Oh, wait. You don’t have to try to imagine that.

A months-long media scandal was invented right out of thin air when former FBI Director James Comey insisted in a self-serving memo he wrote to himself that then-President Donald J. Trump had asked him to drop an investigation into his former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

Then there was the spectacle that was former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony back in 2019 as increasingly desperate Democrats tried repeatedly with loaded questions to browbeat Mueller into “admitting” that Barr or Sessions had obstructed his investigation. However, time and again Mueller refused to say that.

Mueller had to explain that an attorney general or a president just can’t walk over to the Department of Justice and give them an order: “Shut that down and end it now.” Mueller testified honestly that neither Barr nor Sessions nor former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had ever done anything to interfere with his investigation.

A lot of people were impatiently hoping Donald Trump would be stupid enough to try to obstruct Mueller by firing him, but Trump was smart enough to avoid that trap.

And yet it’s been repeatedly assumed for many months by a plethora of political commentators that Biden or Garland can just pick up a phone and call up the U.S. attorneys or the FBI personnel handling these years-long criminal cases and order them to shut down.

That assumption is now being demonstrated to have been utterly wrong. There was no phone call from Biden or Garland. There was no order given to end this investigation. It’s still very much alive.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.