The NPR Politics Podcast - Special Counsel Named To Investigate President's Son

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that prosecutor David Weiss will be appointed special counsel in the ongoing probe of Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden. Weiss, a Trump appointee, was already overseeing the investigation in his capacity as a federal prosecutor.And Joe Biden has named a new national monument, protecting an area totaling close to a million acres near the Grand Canyon.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, political correspondent Susan Davis, and White House correspondent Tamara Keith.The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Jessie in Kennecott, Alaska. Right now, I'm standing on Root Glacier and staring up at the second largest icefall in the world. This show was recorded at 1.58pm on August 11th, 2023. Things may have changed by the time that you hear it, but I'll still be here freezing my toes off. Okay, here's the show. Ice is underrated as a natural phenomenon. It sounds particularly nice in August in DC. Especially when you have to run from the

courthouse to the Justice Department at relatively high speed. Yeah, it's been a sweaty summer over there, I presume. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Keri Johnson, national justice correspondent. Well, and the reason, Keri, that you are doing all that running today is because Attorney General Merrick Garland has named a special counsel to investigate President Biden's son, Hunter. Today's announcement affords the prosecutors, agents, and analysts working on this matter the ability to proceed with their work expeditiously This is the continuation of an ongoing investigation in the president's son. Carrie, I'm hoping you can just explain all of this for us. So this is Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who had already been investigating Hunter

Biden. But this is changing things? Changing things a little bit, Miles. He has been investigating Hunter Biden for several years now, since 2019 or so. And of course, David Weiss was appointed by the former President Donald Trump. But the current administration kept him on because of this Hunter Biden investigation. And, you know, over time, there's been a lot of back and forth, including with members of Congress on the Republican side. But Weiss has insisted he's proceeding with this probe. Now, this week, something has changed. And as of Tuesday of this week, David Weiss notified the attorney general that something had changed in his investigation, that it had reached

a certain stage, is the terminology Merrick Garland used. And as a result, Weiss asked to be appointed special counsel, and Garland granted him that power today. The main difference, the main change seems to be at the end of a special counsel investigation, that person writes a whole report about why they decided to prosecute some people and why they declined to prosecute others. And Merrick Garland says when that report is in, pursuant to the Justice Department regulations in the law, he's going to try to make some of that public. OK, so how does becoming special counsel actually change the powers that David Weiss has in terms of investigating? Not much. OK, so the special counsel operates outside the day-to-day supervision of the Justice Department, but still the DOJ leaders like the Attorney General would

have the ability to override some big decision that David Weiss would want to pursue. The difference is that when it comes to a special counsel, the Justice Department has to notify members of Congress when they override the special counsel's decisions. And the other difference is that the writing of a report. Carrie, there's a part of this that seems messy to me, in that this is the same attorney who had reached a plea deal with Hunter Biden just a few weeks ago. That deal seemed to fall apart in court. And apparently in this announcement, that deal is completely gone. Yeah. After I ran over to the Justice Department to watch Merrick Garland make this announcement, a word came through on the court docketing system that in that case in Delaware, where Hunter Biden had apparently reached a deal to plead guilty to two tax charges and be diverted on a gun possession charge while he was addicted to drugs, that prosecutors say they're now at an impasse with Hunter Biden's lawyers. And that deal is dead. That deal is dead. So they may be on a path for trial, not a plea deal.

And the open question is, what facts has this U.S. attorney, David Weiss, uncovered to reach a certain stage in this investigation? And one of the main questions in my mind, and I've asked people at the Justice Department, they won't answer me, is Weiss initially was investigating not just Hunter Biden, the president's surviving son, but also others. And the special counsel paperwork, you know, DOJ is such a stickler for the paperwork, references this probe involving allegations of criminal conduct by Hunter Biden and others. Garland and Weiss are two people who seem to work so hard to say they are above the politics of the situation. Weiss wrote a letter to Congress, to Jim Jordan, the head of the Judiciary Committee just a few weeks ago, sort of pushing back on Republican concerns that this has been

overly politicized or that Hunter Biden was getting a sweetheart deal. They are clearly very aware of how politically fraught this is. But it is amazing to me that we are now in a position where both the former president and the current president, who are the frontrunners for the nomination in 2024, now have three concurrent special counsel investigations going into either themselves or their families. I don't have any brilliant political analysis on this because we've never been here before. And I do think this all happens at a time where a significant number of Americans do question the integrity and the nonpartisan nature of the judicial system. And it does seem like a very politically sort of dangerous and tricky time.

And there's no easy, clean, clear way out of this. Well, the solution used to be to appoint an independent counsel. And when that law lapsed after all kind of mayhem and mess during the Bill Clinton administration, they turned to this regulatory power, this special counsel power. It's supposed to insulate investigations from allegations of partisanship. But that doesn't seem to work very well, especially in this environment. The question is, what's the alternative? Absolutely. So David Weiss was held over from the Trump administration. He was leading this investigation. He's asked to be named special counsel. He is today named special counsel. And Republicans

on Capitol Hill, like Jamie Comer, the Kentucky Republican who leads the House Oversight Committee, now says, OK, well, this is a stonewall attempt by the Justice Department and the Biden administration, a stonewall congressional oversight when for a long time the request or demand from Republicans had been appoint a special counsel. Well, now they have. And the answer is still not satisfactory, at least politically. And politically, I also think it's worth noting that significant numbers of House Republicans, including the speaker of the House, have already been leaning into an impeachment conversation against sitting President Joe Biden. Republicans don't have the goods on that yet. People like Jim Jordan and James Comer have been suggesting that the president could be implicated in the business activities of Hunter Biden. There is simply, as we sit here today, no concrete impeachable evidence of that. But they have these ongoing investigations into the Biden administration. And frankly,

most congressional Republicans in the House are very loyally behind Donald Trump. And I think that the political pressure in Congress to turn up the heat on a potential impeachment inquiry only intensifies because of this news. They'll both say, look, they're stonewalling Congress. And look, there's got to be something more to this. That's what I was going to ask, Sue, is a lot of listeners are probably listening to this thinking, is the only way that some of these House Republicans are the only way that they're going to be satisfied is if in black and white, this whole thing ends up by saying that, yes, President Joe Biden was somehow implicated and did illegal things related to his son. Is that the only way this ends up in a way that House Republicans are satisfied with? I think that if you look at it strictly through a political lens, I think that many Republicans, one, simply do political attack against the president that they oppose is good politics for them going into a national election, especially as a counter argument to the myriad legal problems their own potential nominee has. politics, but it's very real. And I think that this kind of development politically probably enhances the internal power, at least, that the speaker has to be able to move forward with at

least an impeachment inquiry into the president, which is what the speaker was discussing before Congress went out for the August break. Have we heard anything from the White House and from Hunter Biden's legal team, Carrie? The White House is just referring all questions to the Justice Department. And what I've been hearing is that the White House learned about this announcement when it became public. You know, DOJ did not call over and give any advance notice. As for Hunter Biden, his lawyer, Chris Clark, put out a statement saying this doesn't really change their understanding of the nature of the investigation. It's the same guy in charge, David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware.

And from their point of view, his powers don't really change being a special counsel. They said that whether it's in Delaware or D.C. or anywhere else, they expect a, quote, fair resolution, not infected by politics. And they say they're going to do what's necessary on behalf of Hunter Biden to make that happen. What comes next as this process unfolds? Well, I think the most likely thing to happen next is for the judge to respond to the notification by prosecutors in Delaware that this plea deal is in an impasse and it's basically dead. We may expect some kind of court filing from Hunter Biden's legal team. But once the government says the plea deal's dead, it seems like it's dead. I don't know how you do CPR on it anymore. And then I think they're potentially on a path to trial. And other things I'll be watching for, Miles, are whether anybody

else of note gets interviewed by the FBI or these Justice Department prosecutors working for David Weiss. You know, the allegations from Capitol Hill, at least, have been that other Biden family members may have some involvement in some of these accusations. And I don't know where that ends up, but certainly I have a lot of questions about whether other people are going to be interviewed of note. All right. Well, we will leave it there for now. NPR's Carrie Johnson, thank you so much. Happy to be here. All right. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. And we're back. And senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith joins us now. And Tam, you've been traveling this week with the president. He went to Arizona and he designated

a new national monument near the Grand Canyon. Can you tell us a little bit more about what this monument is and why it matters? Yeah, so it's about a million acres of land surrounding the Grand Canyon National Park. And this is land that originally belonged to Native Americans and was taken from them. And in essence, this is giving that land back, permanently protecting it. And Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said that it will be jointly managed going forward. The Bajnawajo Itakupeni, or Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, will help address past injustices and create an abiding partnership between the United States and the region's tribal nations in caring for these lands. And there are about 3,000 significant sites in this land, culturally and religiously important sites. So those will be permanently protected. Also, there had been a moratorium in place in this area on future uranium mining leases and permits. This will make that permanent. So existing uranium mining can continue. Future uranium mining, it is not happening.

So it doesn't sound like this is necessarily substantively a huge deal, but maybe one of those days where it just feels good to get to be president, to do something like this? And have a beautiful backdrop with, you know, and create a new big piece of protected land. It was really important to the congressional delegation. They had been lobbying heavily for this. It had bipartisan support. Polling in the state indicated it's widely popular. And, oh, wait, this is a state that will be a key swing state. That's what I was going to say. Just so happens to be in Arizona, which is pretty important looking ahead to 2024. Exactly. It's one of those key states. Also, particularly significant for Secretary Haaland. Yeah, she's the first Native American

Interior Secretary. And it was a pretty neat event with leaders from tribal nations there for the signing in this just beautiful expanse. The indigenous vote in Arizona is also not insignificant. It tends to vote Democratic. You know, the Arizona margin was super narrow in 2020. There's politics at everything the president's going to do now who's running for re-election, especially in a state that could be one of the most decisive in 2024. And to do something that means a lot to a very critical voting population, it doesn't take a genius to connect the political dots in this one. Right. And this is actually the fifth monument that President Biden has designated. He did another one, the Bears Ear Monument, one in Colorado right before a big Senate race there. So, you know,

this is a thing that a president can do. Presidents don't have a lot of unilateral powers domestically. Making monuments is a thing they can do. We should also note that there's probably a lot of things that Indigenous and Native American communities would like to do that are much more complicated. So this is one of the easier ones to give sort of a show of respect to that community. And there's a lot of other requests that might not be as easy to deliver on. Well, and the climate angle is huge here too, right? Because President Biden has been trying to tout himself as the president who has done the most to fight climate change of any president in our lifetime. And I wonder how that kind of PR fight is going. Does he feel like he's getting enough credit for the things that his administration

has done? That was a big message of this trip that he took out West was, hey, look at all of these climate related things that we've done or we're doing. He, in New Mexico, went to a factory that used to make Solo cups. I don't know if they were red, but they made Solo cups, and it had been shuttered since 2020, this factory. Now it is opening to make windmills, the giant wind towers. He has talked about it on this trip in fundraisers where there isn't tape, but where you often get a little more insight into the president's thinking. He, at one fundraiser, talked about how he doesn't feel like he's getting credit yet for these things that they've done. And he thinks that eventually the credit will come, that people

will understand that this thing called the Inflation Reduction Act is a huge investment in green energy and other climate-related incentives. He thinks eventually he might get credit for that, he hopes. And then two days later at another private fundraiser at a very lovely home in Park City, Utah, he said, you know, maybe we made a mistake calling it the Inflation Reduction Act because people don't know what it does. Well, also, the Inflation Reduction Act has a ton of climate change provisions in it. But these are like long term generational shifts of like tax, you know, it would take just in the beginning of implementing. Yeah, absolutely. It'd take decades to sort of reap the benefits of this. So the idea that like tax, you know, it would take decades to sort of reap the benefits of this.

So the idea that like people, one, understand the climate change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act and are feeling it in any real time way is like, of course, you're not going to have a groundswell of support from America. Thank you, Mr. President. Right. Isn't this like a broad, every president, I feel like feels kind of frustrated with the credit that they get for the things they've done. Yeah, I mean, part of it, you could say, is the White House's fault. Like this is a campaign swing. That's a messaging swing. But they do have a pretty powerful microphone. And maybe they haven't been talking about this in a way that has been effective to their cause. And also, like voters just don't say thank you. Very rare. You know, elections are really very rarely about the past. They're always about the future. And I think it might take a long time for anyone who's

affected by this to connect that dot of what it meant. And also it's like, great, what are you doing now? You know, and I think that that is going to be a challenge for them, especially for things like climate change provisions that are like generational and shifts. This isn't something that in any way is going to have a real time impact, I think, on the average everyday American. Yeah, it gets at this kind of broader issue of like fighting climate change. It is really hard to get politicians to care about climate change because it's such a long-term, big-picture thing that it's really hard to like say, I did this and so this happened. You know, it's like going to be decades. And yet part of this trip was completely overshadowed by a hurricane driven fire in Hawaii that killed dozens of people.

And there were all of these headlines as the president is trying to talk about what he's doing about climate change, about this terrible fire, about heat waves in the south. And there had been heat waves in in the South and there had been heat waves in the West, I think that the White House is of the view that people are growing increasingly conscious of the threat of climate change, that people are believing that all of these things aren't just coincidences, that more and more people are concerned about climate change. Especially in a state like Arizona. In a state like Arizona, yeah. All right, let's take a quick break.

And when we get back, Can't Let It Go. And we're back. And it's time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where we talk about the things we just cannot let go of, politics or otherwise. Sue, why don't we start with you? This week is a politics thing. We already talked about it on the podcast, but the Ohio special election or the referendum on the ballot question. We had a very good podcast on it earlier in the week. But the thing I can't let go about it is the turnout for this election.

And we didn't really get deep on that. But part of why I can't let it go is that this is a process that Republicans essentially engineered, both the timing and how it would be done in order to sort of benefit their side. They controlled the secretary of state's office, the legislature, the governor's office. And also holding elections in August is generally done because you expect that people are on vacation. People aren't always in town. Who wants to vote in August? People don't like to think about politics in August. I think they were trying to minimize turnout. Exactly. And the exact opposite happened. Obviously, the election has not been fully

certified yet. But as of this morning, over three million votes were cast in that election. And for perspective, it's about three quarters of the vote that was cast in the competitive 2018 Senate race. And it's almost double the amount of votes that was cast in the last competitive Senate Republican primary. So the turnout of that race really surprised me. I was texting. I have a bunch of friends in Ohio. And I was, you know, before I said, what are you thinking? And they were like, it's so hard to tell. It's so hard to tell. And I think it surprised everybody. So that's what I can't let go this week. Wow. I mean, I think it is, as you guys discussed on the pod earlier this week, proof once again that when you try to take away people's opportunity to have a voice,

they often have a giant roar. It's also tricky, too. And I was on a press call with the Ohio Democratic chair this week. And another thing I think is funny about this, like too cute by half by Republicans, perhaps, is that why do it in an off year? You know, I think that also doing it in an off year is a way to like not keep up the momentum on a presidential year, especially next year. But at the same time, doing having this ballot question in November has also given Democrats a new voter file that will show you more first time voters, persuadable voters, people that voted one way or another. So it also sort of gives them a tactical tool going into 2024 that they might not have had if the ballot question was on next November's ballot as well. So there's some political ironies happening in many different

ways about what happened. It's also hard to imagine. I cannot think. And this also obviously goes back to abortion as something that drives turnout, too, right? Because this was considered kind of a proxy battle ahead of the November election. And I cannot think of another topic that would do this for three million votes for an off year election in August. Like what else drives people to vote that much? I can't think of another topic. Yeah. Tam, what can't you let go of? So as we discussed, I was on this Western swing with the president. And when you are in the press pool, you spend a lot of time just waiting, sitting, sitting often in vans. However, President Biden had this interview with the Weather Channel at the Grand Canyon. And we were like, hey, hey, can you let us out of the

vans? And while we were enjoying the majesty of the Grand Canyon, one of the park rangers was telling us about this really amazing snake that maybe has a Barbie tie-in. I don't know. Okay. They have pink rattlesnakes in the Grand Canyon. It is a rattlesnake that only lives in the Grand Canyon, and it is adapted to the red dirt of the Grand Canyon. It is called Sea Organus Abyssus, the Grand Canyon Rattlesnake, and it's pink. Is it dangerous? I mean, it's not Barbie pink. I was going to say, I feel like it

sounds fun until I think about like a camouflaged rattlesnake and I, now I'm kind of scared. Yeah, I just Google imaged some snake pictures. It's a little Barbie pink. That was a little Barbie pink. We were suddenly very nervous about stepping on a snake. And the ranger was like, oh, don't you worry. All of these feet tromping around. No rattlesnake wants to see you. So it is going to clear. They have definitely cleared the premises in advance of the president's arrival.

I feel like there's some joke about snakes avoiding the press pool or something like that. I feel like I can't think of the joke right now. But it'll come to me in like a week. It'll hit me. Miles, what can't you let go of? The thing I cannot let go of is this week, we had, I feel like once a year, there's a really good baseball fight. And there are a lot of sports where fights happen all the time. Baseball is not one of them. I feel like every once in a while you'll see people kind of yell at each other. The dugout's so clear. People, some light shoving, you know.

But mostly it's kind of just like puffing your chest out and being like, you don't come after my guy. I won't come after your guy. But this week in a game between the Cleveland Guardians and the Chicago White Sox, punches were thrown, including one that landed, knocked the guy down. And then he like got up and like, legs were all jelly. Like, you know, when you, like, really land a right hook. So I just, like, I'm not condoning fighting, but I do think, like, in a sport where there is none, I think I appreciate it a little bit more just because it's kind of special. Was it a full, like, emptying dugout? Everyone, obviously, yeah.

I mean, people were grabbing each other. People were pulling each other back. But it was really these two guys, and, like, threeying dugout. Everyone, obviously, yeah. I mean, people were grabbing each other. People were pulling each other back. But it was really these two guys, and, like, three or four punches were thrown. One guy threw, like, three, missed all of them. The other guy only threw one but landed it. So I think if it was a boxing match, he probably won, like, 10-8. Does this happen frequently on the NPR softball team? All right, that's a wrap for today. Our executive producer

is Mathoni Maturi. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Elena Moore and Casey Morrell. Research and fact-checking by our intern, Lee Walden. Thanks to Krishnadev Kalamer and Lexi Shapil. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.