The Lead with Jake Tapper: Rep. Daniel Goldman, (D-NY), Is Interviewed About Whistleblower's Allegations justice Dept. Mishandled Investigation
Interview
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Well, first, I want to say about both of them, there is no question that they are diligent hardworking agents. And as I have encountered as a former federal prosecutor, many times agents are often disappointed after they put in tons of man hours. This was a five-year investigation. He testified of doing over 60 interviews, hundreds of thousands of documents that they may be frustrated that their ultimate recommendation was not granted.
But what's important is to understand the system here and how this works. When they made that recommendation to the Department of Justice Tax Division, their role is effectively over. The DOJ Tax Division then does an evaluation of the charges. The prosecutors there do.
They wrote in this case a 100 page memo that had tons of reservations and concerns about the case, which we know because they did not give a blanket approval for the charges, they instead assessed it with discretion, which means that it goes back to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the U.S. Attorney's Office discretionary decision whether or not to charge because there are reservations. Then the U.S. Attorney's Office gets that information, and they meet with defense lawyers, and defense lawyers make their presentation of their defenses and why the government is wrong in this case.
The agents in this case did not see that 100 page memo. They were not privy to the presentations by the defense attorneys. And they don't have to prove the case at trial, the prosecutors do. And that's why these very difficult charging decisions are made by prosecutors and not these agents.
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That's the disconnect that we have here.
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I disagree with that. I disagree with that.
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Because you are -- you very rarely go interview the children of a subject of an investigation if they were not, in any way, indicated to be involved in this. And you especially don't when it is a sensitive investigation like this, that is a hyper over aggressive step that is unnecessary to prove that element of the case. And I think that's part of the problem here is that many of what their suggestions were are very over aggressive and did not take into consideration the fact that much of the conduct they were talking about was an election year where the subject's father was on the ballot.
So the, quote, "slow walking" that they talk about was actually done by Bill Barr's Justice Department because of election year sensitivities. And so, to the extent it was slow walked or he has issues with the search warrant, you know, that was the Bill Barr Justice Department. And we know Bill Barr was not afraid of abusing his power for the benefit of Donald Trump as he did with Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.
And he mentioned one other thing, Jake, the equitable treatment of taxpayers, let's talk about Roger Stone. Roger Stone settled with the Department of Justice in a case that was about the same amount of money as this case according to the agents. And he settled civilly, even though the allegations were that he essentially hid money in shell companies in order to evade paying those taxes.
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And the vast majority of cases like Hunter Biden's, like Roger Stone's are settled civilly. So the fact that Hunter Biden is actually pleading guilty to any sort of criminal charge in a case like this --
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-- where it would be really difficult to prove knowing intentional evasion, which is a very high standard is quite remarkable in and of itself.
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It's belied and undermined completely by Mr. Weiss's letter. And this is another thing where they clearly did not understand the process because in their Ways and Means testimony they only talked about a special counsel and Weiss saying that he was not going to be either allowed or asked for to become a special counsel which was a decision that Bill Barr made. But what they didn't understand or talk about is this special attorney under section 515. And what Mr. Weiss made very clear is he was not going to be a special counsel, he was not necessary. He would either partner with a different venue, a different district, or if not, he had full authority to pursue charges under --
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-- the special attorney statute. He never got to that point. He never was going to needed to file the charges, and ultimately Hunter Biden waived venue in order to do this in Delaware, they were in regular communication with the defense attorney. So this is yet another somewhat inflammatory allegation that's just belied by the facts that we're dealing with here.
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Thanks, Jake.
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