The WSJ has an editorial out today taking President Biden to task for “sending an inappropriate signal to the Justice Department” by publicly vouching for his son’s innocence at the same time the Department is conducting a criminal investigation. The editorial is fine as far as it goes, but, atypically for the WSJ, grossly misses the main point. The problem here is not principally that Joe Biden is speaking up for Hunter, something most people would regard as normal if not praiseworthy. The problem is that Merrick Garland has not appointed a Special Counsel to oversee the case. If DOJ’s provisions for appointing a Special Counsel don’t apply here, one must wonder why they exist at all.

The failure to appoint a Special Counsel in these circumstances is particularly odd given that Garland has already appointed one to look into Joe Biden’s apparent serious mishandling of classified documents when he was Vice President. Of course, the political usefulness of appointing a Special Counsel in that instance was especially acute, given that a Special Counsel had already been appointed to look into, among other things, Donald Trump’s own apparent mishandling of classified (and other) government documents when he left the White House. But the appointment of a Special Counsel should not depend on its political utility, nor on DOJ’s need to avoid charges of operating under a double standard. It should depend solely on whether the reasons for having provisions for the appointment of someone outside the normal chain of political accountability apply. When the President’s son is the target of the investigation, they apply as clearly as it’s possible to imagine.

[True, but it makes the eventual outcome even less accountable than it is now. Does anyone think that Garland would appoint someone any more inclined to press charges against Hunter Biden than his in-house staff? All this would do is disconnect Biden and his administration from the eventual lack of charges that will be forthcoming. At the very least, it would punt all these decisions for another several months as a special counsel would likely have to start from nearly scratch to be truly “independent.” — Ed]