Why not the same standard for the president’s son we had for Steve Bannon?
Opinion: WSJ
Give the president’s son props for theater. Most uncooperative witnesses subpoenaed by Congress simply don’t show up. They let their lawyers haggle out a resolution. Or, if they do show up, they invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions.
Not Hunter Biden.
When the House Oversight and Judiciary committees subpoenaed him to testify at a closed-door deposition last month, he did more than refuse. He held a press conference outside the Capitol where he denounced Republicans, characterized the impeachment investigation as illegitimate, and said he would answer questions only in a public hearing.
“What are they afraid of?” he taunted. “I’m here. I’m ready.” He then drove off without taking questions. On Fox News, Oversight Chairman James Comer said Hunter had given Congress a “middle finger.”
Come Wednesday the Republicans will give their response. Both the Oversight and Judiciary committees will be marking up resolutions to hold Hunter in contempt. If they pass in committee, they go to the full House. If the House passes them, the question becomes whether Joe Biden’s Justice Department will prosecute.
Therein lies a snag. Many believe that Attorney General Merrick Garland will decline to bring charges, the same way Eric Holder refused to prosecute former IRS official Lois Lerner when the House held her in contempt in 2014. This time the decision is even more fraught politically, because it involves the president’s son in an election year.
But a decision to protect Hunter from prosecution in a clear case of contempt isn’t risk-free. When Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats controlled the House in the first two years of the Biden administration, they cited two former Trump officials—Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro—for contempt. The two men had defied subpoenas to testify before the Jan. 6 committee. After the House voted them in contempt, the Biden Justice Department prosecuted and ultimately secured convictions.
A Journal editorial supported Mr. Bannon’s contempt prosecution as necessary to restore credibility to a key congressional power: “Republicans held official Lois Lerner in contempt in their probe of IRS bias, but Justice never prosecuted. We count at least four times in recent years that Congress made criminal contempt referrals, and none was prosecuted. If Mr. Bannon becomes another, everyone will assume that Congressional subpoenas have no force.”
That is what is also at stake with Hunter Biden’s defiance. If people can flout lawful congressional subpoenas or set their own terms for compliance—especially when related to an impeachment inquiry—it effectively renders congressional investigations toothless.
Hunter Biden’s defenders argue that he wasn’t saying he wouldn’t testify, only that he insisted on doing it at a public hearing. Never mind that there’s no legal basis for such a defense. The same Democrats now defending Hunter were singing a different tune when Mr. Bannon was in the dock.
“No one in the United States of America has the right to blow off a subpoena by court or by the United States Congress,” said Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, now ranking member of the Oversight Committee. And he was right.
Witnesses don’t get to decide how they will testify. Those subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee, for example, were first deposed behind closed doors before they testified publicly. Mr. Comer and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan seek to do the same with Hunter. If Mr. Garland doesn’t prosecute, it will stink of special treatment and a double standard for the president’s son.
The committee also wants to know if the president had any role in Hunter’s decision to defy the subpoena.
Another pass for Hunter would become a political liability in President Biden’s re-election bid. You can bet Donald Trump would bring up Hunter’s name in a debate—and highlight the many whoppers the elder Mr. Biden told about his son’s overseas business dealings when they last sparred in 2020.
But if House Republicans really want Hunter’s answers, and not simply a campaign issue, there is a route that doesn’t require the Justice Department’s cooperation: inherent contempt. While each chamber of Congress holds this power, it hasn’t been exercised since 1934.
Under inherent contempt, the House could enforce its contempt finding itself by bringing Hunter before the House and putting him on trial. If he’s found guilty, the House could detain him under its own authority. In 1821 the Supreme Court recognized this power in Anderson v. Dunn.
In that case, the justices held that inherent contempt was essential to Congress’s ability to function as a legislative and deliberative body. Without this power, it ruled, Congress would be “exposed to every indignity and interruption that rudeness, caprice, or even conspiracy, may meditate against it.”
Indignity. Interruption. Rudeness. Almost sounds as if they had Hunter Biden in mind.
