Veteran U.S. attorney David Weiss, known for his willingness to take on powerful Delaware figures, kept his investigation into Biden’s son out of the 2020 campaign.
the appointment of a special prosecutor to shield Weiss’s investigation from the influence of the Biden administration.
Now, that record may hold clues to Weiss’s approach as he weighs whether to seek charges against a president’s son who has intermingled his business dealings with the Biden family’s political connections.
In June of 1989, Weiss resigned his post as an assistant U.S. Attorney and was appointed special prosecutor to oversee Aiello’s case. Aiello went on to plead guilty to extortion. In 1992, Justice, whose family has long been close with the Bidens, hired Weiss as his defense attorney. But Weiss was disqualified from the case on account of his previous government work on the corruption probe, and Justice was convicted of extortion. Weiss was drawn back into the world of Delaware’s leading families in 1996, when Anne Marie Fahey, a young secretary in the office of Delaware's then-governor, Tom Carper, went missing.
Tom Ostrander, the Duane Morris partner who hired Weiss and introduced him to Fahey’s family, credits Weiss with the success of the prosecution. In contrast to Weiss, Connolly had earned a reputation for having a conservative agenda in addition to being an aggressive prosecutor. “Colm was a little more outspoken about things,” said Oberly, the former Delaware attorney general, who was later appointed by Barack Obama to succeed Connolly as U.S. attorney.
Tigani, whose family owns a valuable beer distributorship in the state and maintained longstanding ties to the Bidens, served as a bundler for Biden’s presidential primary campaign in 2007, soliciting contributions from his employees and their partners and delivering the checks in bulk to campaign staff. In the course of his bundling, he engaged in a “straw donor” scheme, reimbursing employees for their contributions as a way of evading the cap on how much he could personally give.
Looking back on his downfall, Tigani holds grudges against just about everybody involved, from the Bidens, to the News Journal, which first brought attention to his political influence, to the federal judge who oversaw his case, to his own father, with whom he remains embroiled in long-running litigation related to the family business. The rare exception is Weiss. “He was a straight shooter,” Tigani said of the man who sent him to prison.
“It’s very difficult to be a high-quality prosecutor and at the same time have clubby relationships with virtually everybody in town,” Manning said. “There’s a detachment to the job that suits David just fine.” While investigators pursued suspicions of possible money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the criminal investigation eventually came to focus on whether he had paid taxes on all of his income, according to a person familiar with it. Hunter Biden has maintained that he acted appropriately.
Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, had tasked the U.S. attorney there, Scott Brady, with vetting information from Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani claimed to have information implicating the Bidens in corruption, but his relationship with Trump andthat he had met with a Russian agent as he sought dirt on the Bidens, cast doubts on his claims.
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