WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump is considering pushing for a special lawyer to be appointed to advance a federal tax investigation to the son of President-elect Joe Biden, creating a potential confrontation with incumbent Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.
Trump, angry that Attorney General William Barr has not publicly announced the two-year ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden, has consulted with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, White House attorney Pat Cipollone, and external allies.
This is according to several Trump administration officials and Republicans close to the White House who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss private affairs.
Beyond appointing a special prosecutor to investigate young Biden, sources said Trump is interested in having another special attorney commissioned to examine his own unfounded allegations of electoral fraud. But if he expects his newly appointed acting attorney general to go beyond Barr on either issue, he could end up disappointed quickly.
On Monday evening, Barr announced the effective resignation next week, revealing his plans about a week after Hunter Biden publicly revealed that he was under investigation related to his finances. Generally, the policy of the Department of Justice is not to disclose ongoing investigations, although the subjects of such investigations may do so.
Rosen, the deputy attorney general, will enter the Justice Department’s most important job as an actor. A long-standing litigant, he has served as Barr’s top deputy since May 2019, but has largely strayed from the spotlight. He said Tuesday in a statement that he was “honored” to serve and that he “will continue to focus on implementing the Department’s key priorities.”
Trump continues to weigh his options, considering whether to pressure Rosen to make an appointment with a special attorney or, if necessary, replace the incumbent attorney general with someone more likely to fulfill his wishes. He has even asked his team of lawyers, including personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to look into whether the president has the power to appoint a special lawyer himself.
A key question will be whether Rosen can withstand presidential pressure – and potentially slender attacks – during the Trump administration’s waning weeks. Otherwise, Rosen could be sidelined in favor of others more willing to comply with Trump’s offer.
Believing that a special council investigation could hurt a Biden administration before it began, Trump aides have urged the president to push for one, which will make it impossible for the investigation to be easily stopped by the incoming president. No firm decision has been made.
Trump announced that Barr would step down on December 23 amid persistent tension between the president and the attorney general over Hunter Biden’s investigation. Trump was angry for days after learning that Barr knew about Hunter Biden’s tax investigation before the election, but did not disclose it.
He was also unhappy with the fact that Barr said in a widely reported interview with the AP that the Justice Department had not uncovered widespread election fraud that would have affected the election results.
For much of his tenure, Barr was perceived as one of the president’s most loyal cabinet members, especially after he framed the results of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia in favor of Trump, though the special adviser did not. exonerated the president from obstruction of justice. . It was Barr who first appointed a U.S. attorney to review the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn and then tried to dismiss the criminal charges against Flynn., who pleaded guilty twice to lie to the FBI.
At Barr’s exit, the most important thing in Trump’s Justice Department is his investigation into Hunter Biden, which involves several U.S. attorneys ’offices and FBI outside offices. Appointing a special attorney could be tricky, as it required consolidating different angles of research and bringing in someone new to run the probe and catch up.
Under federal regulations, a special attorney can only be fired by the attorney general and for specific reasons, such as misconduct, waiver of duty, or conflict of interest, reasons that must be explained in writing. The appointment of a special lawyer for Hunter Biden’s investigation would also indicate a more lengthy and complicated investigation than the current investigation, so far largely focused on his taxes. A citation to search for documents of the young Biden requested information related to more than two dozen entities, including the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
Either way, the investigation complicates the election of Joe Biden as Attorney General, on whose shoulders this investigation would be placed. Any candidate for attorney general is likely to face a lot of questions at a confirmation hearing about how they would oversee the investigation.
It could be that Rosen will remain in office a few weeks after Biden was sworn in on January 20th. If Trump doesn’t fire him, that is.
Rosen has been the public face of some of the Justice Department’s most important actions, including the antitrust case against Google and the criminal case against opioid maker Purdue Pharma. Prior to joining the Department of Justice, he worked in the Department of Transportation as a general counsel and then deputy secretary.
At Rosen’s confirmation hearing in 2019, he suggested he was willing to reject political pressure from the White House, if necessary. He told lawmakers that criminal investigations should “continue with the facts and the law” and that trials should be “free from undue political influences.”
“If the right answer is to say no to someone, I will say no,” he said then.