President Biden is reportedly telling aides and allies that he deeply regrets appointing Attorney General Garland to his cabinet, citing Mr. Garland’s slowness to prosecute President Trump, and the Justice Department charging the president’s son, Hunter, with multiple felonies.  

According to the Washington Post, Mr. Biden believes that Mr. Garland helped facilitate Trump’s return to the White House by not swiftly prosecuting the 45th president over the January 6 attack at the Capitol and Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Special Counsel Jack Smith was not appointed to his position by Mr. Garland until November 2022 — more than halfway through Mr. Biden’s term — and Trump was not indicted for election obstruction until August 2023. 

The indictment came late enough that Trump’s legal team was able to delay a trial until the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling on presidential immunity in July, crippling Mr. Smith’s case. His indictment of Trump in the Mar-a-Lago affair also came so late that Mr. Smith ran out of time to successfully appeal a ruling by Judge Aileen Cannon, who threw out the case. 

Had Trump been tried on Mr. Smith’s charges, Mr. Biden believes, the election would have gone differently. 

How the public would have reacted to Trump being tried on criminal charges in federal court will never be known. Only Trump rode the indictments — and his one conviction on fraud charges in a Manhattan court — to additional fundraising, press attention, and support in the polls. In the 24 hours after Trump was convicted in the New York hush-money case in May, his campaign raised more than $50 million. 

Yet the federal charges, at least in the January 6 case, were far more serious and a conviction could have led to a harsh sentence from Judge Tanya Chutkan, who meted out long prison terms for January 6 protesters who’ve been convicted in her courtroom, and who was consistently ruling in Mr. Smith’s favor. 

Mr. Biden’s frustrations grew even deeper and more personal when Mr. Garland accelerated the investigation into the first son by elevating the U.S. attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, to special counsel. Mr. Weiss eventually charged the younger Mr. Biden with multiple felonies for firearms violations and tax offenses. The first son was convicted in the gun case after an embarrassing trial, and pleaded guilty in the tax case on the eve of trial, perhaps because he knew a pardon was coming. The president pardoned his son on the first Sunday evening of December. 

 The pardon covered any crimes the president’s son may have committed between January 1, 2014, and December 1, 2024 — a time frame which encompassed the period during which the younger Mr. Biden traded on his family name to get money from foreign entities in Ukraine and Communist China. Mr. Weiss still retains his special counsel title, and may still be investigating Mr. Biden for violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

In his pardon, the elder Mr. Biden claimed his son was the victim of a tainted justice system that was weaponized against the first family. 

“I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” the president said. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong.”

The Washington Post reports that during the 2020–2021 transition period, Mr. Biden was urged by members of his inner circle, including his longtime aide and confidant, Senator Kaufman, to  nominate Senator Jones — a former United States attorney and longtime friend of the Bidens — to lead the Justice Department. The Post reports that Mr. Jones, who won an upset victory in a special election to briefly represent deep red Alabama in the Senate in 2017, was the runner-up for the attorney general position, and that Mr. Biden now believes he would have prosecuted Trump with alacrity. In the end, however, according to the Post, the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, successfully recommended Mr. Garland, a favorite in President Obama’s circles, for the position.