The Biden government will ask U.S. prosecutors appointed by President Trump to step down, but the prosecutor who oversees the tax investigation linked to the president’s son Hunter Biden, will remain in office, a senior Justice Department official told Fox. News on Monday.
The fate of Attorney General David Weiss, who runs the Delaware office, has been the source of some speculation. It is standard procedure for new presidents to request the resignation of all US attorneys as soon as they take office. But Fox News peppered Biden’s transition team with questions about Weiss’s future and his team took an official position. Biden vowed to restore the independence of the White House Justice Department.
The senior official also told Fox that John Durham, the US district attorney in Connecticut who was appointed special attorney to investigate the origins of the FBI investigation in the 2016 elections, will resign from his position, but will remain as a special attorney, he said. source.
The transition is scheduled to start on Tuesday and could take weeks to complete.
The DOJ has investigated Hunter Biden’s finances, including scrutiny of some of his business in China and other transactions. The tax investigation was initiated in 2018, a year before older Biden announced his candidacy for the presidency. Hunter Biden confirmed the existence of the investigation in December, after a round of subpoenas was issued in the case.
Trump and his allies accused Hunter Bidden of profiting from his political connections, and also raised questions about his work in Ukraine at the time when his father was vice president and led the Obama administration’s negotiations with the Eastern European nation.
Sources familiar with the Durham investigation told Fox News last week that the lawsuit against senior FBI officials, such as former director James Comey, is “unlikely”. Durham completed part of the CIA investigation last year – and has now shifted its focus to FBI activities, the sources said.
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Senator Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, urged acting attorney general Monty Wilkinson to “refrain from interfering” in the Durham investigation and the federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s “tax affairs” while the Senate works. to confirm Biden’s nominee to lead the Justice Department.
David Spunt, Brooke Singman and Fox News’ Associated Press contributed to this report