The special counsel who spearheaded the federal prosecution of Hunter Biden quietly quit his job in January, getting out of Dodge before the new administration’s housecleaning at the Justice Department.
David Weiss, who infuriated Democrats for criminally charging former President Joe Biden’s son, called it quits just before President Donald J. Trump was officially sworn into office, according to a report from NBC News.
“A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware and a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed that Weiss stepped down as both U.S. attorney and special counsel on Jan. 17 — three days before President Donald Trump began his second term,” the outlet reported.
David Weiss, the federal attorney who investigated and prosecuted Hunter Biden, quietly resigned in January, NBC News has learned. https://t.co/9ZNCwYDJ42
— NBC News (@NBCNews) March 1, 2025
Unlike another Biden-era prosecutor of note, special counsel Jack Smith, there was no official announcement made of Weiss’s stepping down nor has a copy of his letter of resignation been made public. The attention-seeking Smith’s resignation was included in a court filing before Trump was inaugurated.
NBC News cited the usual anonymous sources in two people “familiar with the matter” who said that Weiss resigned voluntarily and was not asked to leave. The former prosecutor did not respond to the outlet’s request for comment.
The special counsel and his team prosecuted Hunter Biden on tax and gun charges, securing felony convictions against the sitting president’s son who was an integral player in the family’s global influence peddling schemes.
But Weiss’s work was all for nothing because Biden went back on another of his promises and issued an unconditional pardon to his son, an allegedly reformed crackhead and sexual degenerate who was the blackest sheep in the family with his exploits infamously chronicled on the “laptop from hell” that contained a trove of video and photographic evidence of his depravity and corruption.
Biden’s pardon not only covered the gun and tax convictions that Weiss won in court but also other “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024,” a ten year period that conveniently begins around the time that Hunter Biden was given a seat on the board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma Holdings in a country that has served as a money laundering Mecca for corrupt interests, including U.S. politicians.
“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” the outgoing president said in a statement announcing his sweeping pardon of his oldest and surviving son, a not thinly veiled shot at Weiss who rejected the idea that his probes were political.
“Other presidents have pardoned family members, but in doing so, none have taken the occasion as an opportunity to malign the public servants at the Department of Justice based solely on false accusations,” Weiss said in his scorching final report.
“Politicians who attack the decisions of career prosecutors as politically motivated when they disagree with the outcome of a case undermine the public’s confidence in our criminal justice system,” he wrote. “The President’s statements unfairly impugn the integrity not only of Department of Justice personnel, but all of the public servants making these difficult decisions in good faith.”
Weiss was succeeded by acting U.S. Attorney Shannon T. Hanson.
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