The US Attorney for Delaware Treats Contract Law as a Hypertechnicality

Before I lay out how David Weiss responded to Judge Mark Scarsi’s invitation to address two legal issues with four of the charges against Hunter Biden, let me emphasize: these two arguments are a sideshow. Even if Abbe Lowell’s argument that the statute of limitations expired for Count 1 and his argument that venue is improper for Counts 1-4 of the indictment succeeded, the guts of the indictment, three felony counts for the way in which Hunter paid his 2018 taxes, would remain, along with one misdemeanor each for 2018 and 2019. Lowell also challenged how Weiss charged one of the felonies and the 2019 misdemeanor, but still, the core felony conduct remains unchallenged with these technical challenges (as distinct from the more substantive motions to dismiss).

I’m interested in them, though, for what they might say about Weiss’ conception of his transition from US Attorney to Special Counsel. I’m interested in them for what they might say about a potentially more serious problem with the way Weiss is approaching discovery. I’m interested in them because of the way that Leo Wise and Derek Hines have persistently dodged the unrebutted evidence that David Weiss really did renege on assurances given to Hunter’s attorneys last June that there was no ongoing investigation into the President’s son when he signed the plea deal.

I laid out all the “technical” motions to dismiss here. I wrote about Judge Scarsi’s order for sur-reply briefing here. Links to all these filings are on this page.

I expected Weiss’ sur-reply to address the new legal questions Lowell raised: Did the tolling agreement Hunter signed with Delaware US Attorney David Weiss carry over after Weiss became Special Counsel? Does judicial estoppel prevent Weiss from claiming Hunter was a resident of California in 2018 when he asserted that Hunter was a resident of DC in 2018 in the tax information filed in Delaware?

Sadly, Weiss engaged with neither of those interesting legal questions. Instead, to both questions, he responded with an evidentiary claim, a legal dodge, and an attack (Leo Wise and Derek Hines seem to love such manufactured attacks).

Here’s how it looked in the tolling sur-reply:

Charging 2016 as a crime that occurred in 2020 was not a way to get around statutes of limitation; it was, instead, an allegation that willfulness pertaining to Hunter’s 2016 taxes only happened in 2020.
Weiss only raised the tolling agreement to demonstrate he wasn’t operating in bad faith by charging the 2016 year.
How dare Hunter Biden neglect to mention the tolling agreements that Hunter Biden believes are legally irrelevant for this indictment!

Here’s how it looked in the judicial estoppel sur-reply.

Hunter presented no evidence that the prosecution knew he only moved to California in 2019 and the grand jury found that Hunter was a resident of California in 2018, so there.
There’s no legal authority for dismissing an indictment based on a judicial estoppel claim.
How dare Hunter Biden neglect to mention that “the government” told Judge Noreika that “venue for these offenses and any other related tax offenses lies either in the Central District of California or in the District of Columbia,” which is irrelevant anyway because that statement would have incorporated the felony counts for which venue is California! [my emphasis]

In both retorts, though, Weiss evinced precisely the kind of legal slovenliness I suspect is behind any discovery problems and the refusal to deal with the unrebutted evidence about what Weiss said last June.

Start with the argument that Weiss is estopped from arguing that Hunter was a resident of California in 2018. Weiss relegates that claim — the entire purpose for this sur-reply — to a footnote. The footnote doesn’t address whether Weiss is estopped from making this claim. Rather, he says it’s not a basis to dismiss an indictment.

1 The defendant also argues that the doctrine of judicial estoppel bars the prosecution “from taking inconsistent positions before different courts,” although he cites no authority for the proposition that an indictment returned by a grand jury can be dismissed on that basis. Dkt. 53 at 5.

Is Weiss now arguing that a grand jury presentation is not a court proceeding? Because if he is estopped from making the argument, then how can he make it to a grand jury? Will this give Hunter opportunity to demand grand jury presentation records? And if he is estopped, how does he plan on making the argument at trial?

Plus, by focusing on his evidentiary claims rather than the legal question, Weiss has created a new problem for himself. He asserts that Hunter never moved back to the East Coast in 2018, even though Weiss has charged him for owning a gun starting on October 12, 2018, meaning Weiss is well aware Hunter had left California before his October 15, 2018 extension date for tax filing.

The defendant moved to California in the first week of April 2018 and expressed his intention to stay in California in a text message that he sent from California to his sister-in-law on April 12, 2018, writing, “I’m staying here indefinitely.” While he may have visited the east coast for brief periods later in 2018, he returned back to California, where he continues to live today. It is worth noting that defendant does not proffer any facts to support his claim that he lived in the District of Columbia through the summer of 2019.

This citation to something Hunter wrote to his “sister-in-law” is new; it’s not in the response. Hunter would be within his right to ask to file a sur-sur-reply on this point. And it might be worth doing.

That’s because, in his Delaware response to Hunter’s selective prosecution claim, Weiss relies heavily on this passage of Hunter’s memoir, almost the only thing Hunter said in his book about events from October 2018:

I had returned that fall of 2018, after my most recent relapse in California, with the hope of getting clean through a new therapy and reconciling with Hallie.

Neither happened. [my emphasis]

Only, Weiss replaced the bolded bit — which explains why Hunter returned, to attempt to salvage a romantic relationship with his sister-in-law — with an ellipsis.

Over and over again, Weiss has made the memoir the centerpiece of his reason for charging. Over and over again, Weiss has treated the memoir as transparent truth. Yet the memoir makes it clear that when Hunter moved back in fall 2018, he had the intent of staying, staying with Hallie (as reflected by Weiss’ obnoxious description of Hallie as Hunter’s “girlfriend” in this period), apparently the same person on whose communications with Hunter he relies to claim that Hunter moved permanently to California in 2018.

Weiss may well be able to establish that Hunter was in California for enough days to amount to residency. But he hasn’t addressed the legal question of whether he’ll be legally permitted to argue that.

His response to the tolling question is even nuttier.

Weiss argues that because the US Attorney for Delaware and DOJ’s Tax Division could have charged Hunter for an April 2017 violation, it’s proof that “the government” could have charged him.

The United States’ Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware and the Tax Division are parties to the tolling agreement. Dkt. 29 at 1. Assuming for the sake of argument that the defendant is correct that the Office of Special Counsel would be time barred from bringing failure to pay charges for the 2016 tax year in April 2017 because it was not a party to the agreement, those two entities would not be. The Tax Division can file criminal tax charges in any judicial district in the United States with or without the participation of a United States Attorney’s Office. See 28 C.F.R. §§ 0.70. Further, even before he was made Special Counsel, David C. Weiss, as United States Attorney for the District of Delaware, had full authority to bring criminal tax charges in this case. While Mr. Weiss was appointed Special Counsel on August 11, 2023, he is still the United States Attorney for the District of Delaware and either that office or the Tax Division could have brought the charge in Count 1 and any of the other tax charges contained in the indictment. Nothing about Mr. Weiss’s appointment as Special Counsel precludes that. Thus, the argument that the government had to charge failure to pay for tax year 2016 in June 2020 because it couldn’t charge it in April 2017 is clearly incorrect.

Weiss uses “the government” ten times in the body of this filing, all but one in the section on the tolling agreements.

This is a version of an argument Weiss made aggressively in his Delaware response to Hunter’s Special Counsel challenge (and less aggressively in his Los Angeles response). Insisting that US Attorneys do what they’re permitted to do and Special Counsels do what they’re permitted to do is a “hypertechnicality,” Weiss argued in January.

[E]ven assuming the Attorney General’s delegation of authority under §§ 509, 510, 515, and 533 is unavailable, defendant’s argument boils down to a quibble that the indictment reads “Special Counsel” beneath David Weiss’s name and not “U.S. Attorney.” ECF No. 40, at 4. Such hypertechnicalities have no impact on the indictment’s validity or to the prosecutor’s statutory authority to conduct this litigation on behalf of the United States. Dismissal is thus wholly inappropriate.

Remember: That was a response to an argument that Weiss can’t be Special Counsel because DOJ regulations envision someone who can’t just flip back and forth between one title and another.

The argument is even worse here. The point is, though, that DOJ Tax didn’t charge Hunter with failure to pay his taxes in 2017.

And after that, David Weiss made some non-public argument to Merrick Garland that he legally required the independence granted by Special Counsel status, yet he keeps arguing that (perhaps now that he has discovered Alexander Smirnov was lying when he attempted to frame Joe Biden) he could flip back to US Attorney status with no legal bar. He’s making that argument even though public records indicate that DOJ Tax had real problems with even the charges Weiss was considering in 2022, much less the jerry-rigged charges as presented in Los Angeles. He’s making that argument even though, as Special Counsel, David Weiss appears to have withheld from discovery fairly damning details of the investigation conducted under US Attorney David Weiss. He’s making that argument even though he has never addressed the legal assurances the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware gave to Hunter’s lawyers.

In the diversion motions to dismiss, Hunter is arguing that Weiss breached a contract. Here, the US Attorney for Delaware, where so much of US contract law goes through, is arguing that even someone who is not party to a tolling agreement — which Hunter argues is a contract — can invoke it to deprive someone of his freedom.

Again, I don’t expect Judge Scarsi to be all that sympathetic to Hunter’s arguments and Scarsi could well just adopt Weiss’ argument that both are evidentiary issues for the jury to decide. But I also don’t imagine he’ll appreciate the way this sur-reply dodges both legal questions that Lowell raised.