Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged Wednesday that the U.S. Attorney pursuing a criminal probe of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden has broad independence to pursue appropriate charges, including bringing a case outside of the prosecutor’s base in Delaware if that’s necessary.
Testifying at a Senate oversight hearing, Garland was pressed by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to promise that U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss won’t face bureaucratic obstacles if he decides that Hunter Biden should be prosecuted outside his home state.
“The U.S. attorney has been advised that he has full authority to make those referrals you’re talking about or to bring cases in other districts if he needs to do that,” Garland said. “He has been advised that he should get anything he needs….I have not heard anything from that office that suggests they are not able to do anything that the U.S. attorney wants them to do.”
When Garland was nominated as attorney general, he agreed to leave Weiss — an appointee of former President Donald Trump — in place to complete the Hunter Biden investigation.
While offering those assurances about independence, Garland did not share any substantive update on the investigation into the president’s son. The probe is reportedly focused on Hunter Biden’s failure for years to pay a federal income tax bill that eventually amounted to about $1 million and a false statement Hunter Biden allegedly made about his drug use when purchasing a gun in 2018. Hunter Biden has said he is confident the investigation will clear him of wrongdoing.
While the Hunter Biden questions were the most politically explosive issues aired in the early hours of Wednesday’s hearing, questioning from senators was a potpourri, spanning concerns ranging from violent crime to drugs to guns to the impact of social media platforms on American society.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) questioned Garland about federal law enforcement’s handling of protests that broke out at the homes of several Supreme Court justices after POLITICO reported last May on a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the federal constitutional right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade. The protests intensified after the court formally issued its ruling the next month in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, with the opinion in much the same form as the earlier draft.
Lee, a former law clerk to the author of Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote Dobbs, pressed Garland on why no one has been arrested under a federal statute that prohibits trying to influence the administration of justice by picketing or parading near the homes of federal judges.
“It’s very clear they’re tying to influence in one way or another that those serving on the United States Supreme Court,” Lee said of the protesters. “Yet, not one person to my knowledge has been prosecuted for such things.”
Garland stressed that he responded rapidly to the leak and the protests by assigning more than 70 deputy U.S. Marshals to guard the justices and their families around the clock. “As soon as the Dobbs draft leaked, I ordered the marshals to do something that the marshals had never done in United States history before, which was to protect the justices and their families, 24-7.”
The attorney general was vague about why no one has been charged in connection with the protests, although he said the “priority” of the marshals is keeping the justices and their families safe, not policing the demonstrators. Garland insisted, however, that no directive has been given to ignore that law.
“They have full authority to arrest people under any federal statute, including that statute,” Garland said.
Some experts have said the law could be open to a First Amendment challenge, although the attorney general noted that the Supreme Court marshal wrote to local law enforcement in Maryland and Virginia last year urging them to enforce similar local ordinances.
Democrats also used the hearing to cajole Garland for support for their key issues, with Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) railing against social media companies for enabling drug trafficking and dangerous behavior by teenagers.
“This is out of hand,” Durbin told the attorney general. The chair also bemoaned the influence of the 1996 law known as Section 230, which gives online platforms broad immunity from being sued over content third parties post online and from being sued over the adequacy of their efforts to police that content.
“I think Section 230 has become a suicide pact. We are basically saying you are absolved from liability, make money and deaths result from it,” Durbin said.
Garland called the situation Durbin described “horrible,” but was careful to limit his specific criticism to the role social media plays in drug dealing.
“We do have to do something to force them to provide information to search their own platforms for drugs,” the attorney general said.