The House Judiciary Committee is going to court to lift the curtain of secrecy on why prosecutors investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes did what they did.
The committee filed a lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to compel federal tax prosecutors Mark Daly and Jack Morgan to appear, continuing a battle that has been going on since September, according to CNN.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has told the men not to appear in the case involving the president’s son.
“I urge a negotiated resolution between the committee and DOJ … It is not up to Mr. Daly,” Daly attorney Robert Driscoll said in a letter to the committee.
But the Justice Department said it has been very cooperative with the committee.
“It is unfortunate that despite this extraordinary cooperation from senior DOJ officials, the Committee has decided, after waiting for months, to continue seeking to depose line prosecutors about sensitive information from ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions,” a representative of the Justice Department told Axios.
In its request for a preliminary injunction to force compliance, the Judiciary Committee noted that the request is part of a broader inquiry.
“One question being investigated — that the full House agreed the Committee should continue looking into — is whether the President abused his power by obstructing or influencing, or attempting to obstruct or influence, investigations into his son, Robert Hunter Biden,” the committee said in the filing.
“For years, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) have been investigating Hunter Biden for tax crimes. In the spring of 2023, two IRS whistleblowers who were intimately involved in that investigation came forward and exposed several ways that DOJ had deviated from its standard practices to benefit Hunter Biden,” the panel said, adding “there is ample reason to conclude that DOJ has afforded Hunter Biden special treatment.”
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The filing said there was urgency to counteract potential stall tactics.
”[E]ach day that Daly and Morgan do not testify they obstruct the Committee from deciding whether to recommend that the President be impeached, heighten the risk that crucial information relevant to this investigation may be lost or forgotten, and move the President one day closer to being able to run out the clock at the end of the 118th Congress,” the committee said.
The filing argued that regardless of what the two prosecutors might say, they must appear.
“The Committee’s need for Daly’s and Morgan’s testimony is urgent. Every day that they defy the Committee’s Subpoenas delays and hinders its investigation at a time when the Committee is seeking to conclude its fact gathering,” the committee said.
“Daly and Morgan are obstructing the House’s exercise of its exclusive power to consider articles of impeachment, impeding its efforts to consider legislation and conduct oversight, and irreparably injuring Congress’s stature as a coordinate branch of government engaged in one of its most critical functions,” it said.
“Daly and Morgan each violated his legal duty to comply with the Committee’s lawfully issued Subpoenas, and their defiance is obstructing the Committee’s investigation,” the panel said.
The lawsuit said that “the Committee has uncovered troubling information that DOJ officials have impeded, delayed, and obstructed the criminal investigation of Hunter Biden in an unusual manner.”
It said the president’s comments defending his son raise “the specter that he has abused his power as the head of the Executive Branch to influence the decisions of DOJ, an Executive Branch agency under his control.”
