Congressional Republicans have for months repeatedly written to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland demanding he appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, the president’s son, over his business dealings.
Some even demanded that a specific man be named to lead the inquiry: David C. Weiss, the Trump-appointed Delaware U.S. attorney who has long investigated the case.
But on Friday, after Mr. Garland elevated Mr. Weiss to special counsel status, Republicans in Congress reacted publicly not with triumph, but with outrage. “David Weiss can’t be trusted and this is just a new way to whitewash the Biden family’s corruption,” Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
The reaction was a notable political development, one that underscored both how Mr. Weiss, a Republican, has fallen in conservative circles, and how deeply it has become ingrained in the G.O.P. to oppose the Justice Department at every turn.
“The reality is this appointment is meant to distract from, and slow down, our investigations,” said Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri and chairman of Ways and Means, one of three congressional committees looking into the Biden family’s finances.
But in interviews, away from social media and television appearances, the reaction of many Republicans to Mr. Weiss’s appointment was more nuanced. Privately, some in the G.O.P. were chalking up the development as a victory.
The party had worked for years to elevate the Hunter Biden case — which Democrats have long dismissed as a partisan obsession of the right — to a scandal equivalent to those dogging former President Donald J. Trump, who has faced two impeachment trials, two special counsel investigations and three indictments totaling 78 felony counts against him. Those indictments include charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and willfully retaining national defense information after he left office.
Lol. Good luck getting an equivalent to that list of crimes. (And really, that’s the tip of the iceberg. It doesn’t even get to the Trump family corruption.) Of course, if you listen to Fox, it’s far, far worse.
In an interview with Newsmax, a top Trump adviser, Jason Miller, appeared to echo both sentiments, and foreshadowed coming attacks.
Mr. Miller said the appointment of Mr. Weiss “stinks” and accused the prosecutor of sitting on his hands for years. But, he added, “I do want to make sure that my Republican brethren” don’t “lose sight of the big prize here.”
He described the appointment of a special counsel as “a direct acknowledgment that Hunter Biden did something wrong,” and he recalled President Biden saying in a 2020 debate with Mr. Trump that he had not done anything wrong.
The Republicans are having it both ways and because their followers are completely addled at this point it doesn’t matter. They have two Biden Special Counsel investigations going now. One is against Joe and the classified documents from when he was VP. The other now, against Hunter which is just weird because you don’t need a special counsel to investigate a relative but we’re now back in 1990s Janet Reno territory where a Democratic AG is compelled to name them every five minutes over nothing in order to preserve their reputation, which makes absolutely no difference,
I’m starting to hear pundits saying that this could be a real problem for Biden, people don’t like corruption etc, etc. They seem to think that Joe Biden will have to throw his son under the bus which is ridiculous. All it’s going to do is cause Biden more searing heartache which is the point. If the Republicans can create so much pressure that Hunter Biden ends up back on drugs, they will be ecstatic. (Don’t think that isn’t something they think about.)
It’s starting to work, as we knew it would. They are relentless with this sort of scandal mongering and since they are also shameless they don’t care that it’s completely ridiculous in the face of what their Dear Leader is accused of. The media will be hard-pressed to resist this, what with fake “whistleblowers” and dribs and drabs of so-called evidence being leaked.
We’ve been here before. This is Whitewater and “but-her-emails” all over again. That they have the chutzpah to do it while their nominee is literally under indictment in three different cases and was already impeached twice is actually kind of awe-inspiring, They just keep their heads down and do their thing no matter what else is going on around them. They are like sharks, they never stop moving.