The release of a scathing final report by Special Counsel David Weiss underscores the nadir to which President Biden’s relationship with his own Department of Justice has fallen in the 46th president’s final days in office. 

Mr. Weiss was appointed by Attorney General Garland to investigate the president’s son, who was convicted of lying about his drug use on a gun purchase form. The first son also pleaded guilty to nine felony counts of tax evasion. His father, though, last month issued him a “Full and Unconditional Pardon” that covered any possible federal crimes committed over the last decade. 

The president, in a letter accompanying the pardon issued to his son, called the cases “selective,” “unfair,” infected by “raw politics” and a “miscarriage of justice.” Mr. Weiss, in a final report that runs a mere 27 pages, though with voluminous appendices, calls that editorializing “gratuitous and wrong.” 

Mr. Weiss approvingly quotes the United States district judge in California, Mark Scarsi, who presided over the tax case of Biden fils. Judge Scarsi wrote that “The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States … but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.” 

The special counsel adds that “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.” Mr. Biden declared, though, that “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.”

Mr. Weiss insists that he “never considered whether my decisions would be viewed favorably or unfavorably by any politicians. And when politicians expressed opinions about my conduct, I ignored them because they were irrelevant.” The longtime prosecutor ventures that the “president’s characterizations are incorrect based on the facts in this case, and on a more fundamental level, they are wrong.”

Mr. Weiss had been investigating the younger Mr. Biden for years when a plea deal hammered out between the president’s son and the government collapsed in a Delaware courtroom in 2023. After that, the prosecutor sought appointment as a special counsel. That empowered him to bring criminal charges in both California and Delaware. Garden variety United States attorneys are limited to their native jurisdiction. 

The special counsel also eschews speculating on whether the younger Mr. Biden committed any further crimes than those to which he has already pleaded guilty or been convicted. That is because of the sweeping nature of the president’s pardon of his son, which encompasses  “Those 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, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted.”

Mr. Weiss  ventures that “injecting partisanship into the independent administration of the law undermines the very foundation of what makes America’s justice system fair and equitable. It erodes public confidence in an institution that is essential to preserving the rule of law.” 

The special counsel did secure one guilty plea that was not wiped away by executive fiat. A veteran informant to the FBI, Alexander Smirnov, confessed to lying to the bureau when he claimed to know of five million dollars worth of bribes exchanged between executives of the energy company Burisma and the Bidens. Last week Smirnov was sentenced to six years in prison. 

The release of Mr. Weiss’s final report — it was delivered by Mr. Garland  to Congress on Monday evening — comes on the same day that Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida ruled that  Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on his prosecution of President Trump for election interference can be published. The fate of his dispatch on the classified documents prosecution will be decided at a hearing in her courtroom on Friday.