EDITORIAL: More stink from the Hunter saga

In late 2021, the Senate confirmed Hampton Dellinger as the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general to oversee the Office of Legal Policy. According to the White House, he did an exemplary job.

His work, a Biden administration statement said, “has led to taxpayer savings by overturning unnecessarily costly bid awards. His writings on a range of topics include criticism of government actions and proposals for public sector improvements.” He also enhanced “the reliability of forensic science in investigations and prosecutions.”

It was time for a promotion.

Last week, President Joe Biden announced that he would nominate Mr. Dellinger to lead the Office of Special Counsel, “which investigates corruption in the executive branch and provides protections to federal whistleblowers,” The Washington Free Beacon reported.

The office is tasked with investigating the Hunter Biden matter. Republicans have also asked the office to probe claims by two IRS agents that they were retaliated against when they testified to Congress early this year that the Justice Department slow-walked investigations into accusations against Hunter Biden involving tax evasion and influence peddling.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

Turns out that Mr. Dellinger and Hunter Biden are no strangers. When Hunter Biden was pretending to be a lawyer early in his career, he worked at Boies Schiller Flexner, the same high-powered law firm that employed Mr. Dellinger. And after Hunter Biden put his law degree on ice and entered the family business, “he tapped Boies Schiller Flexner to represent Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy firm where he served as a board member,” according to the Free Beacon.

“Hunter Biden and Boies Schiller Flexner’s crisis management and government response team developed a public relations and lobbying strategy to help Burisma, according to emails from Biden’s laptop,” the Free Beacon noted. “Dellinger served on Boies Schiller Flexner’s Crisis Management and Government Response team, though it is unclear if he did any work for Burisma.”

Large, white-shoe law firms have their fingers in myriad interests while employing scores of attorneys. There is nothing “necessarily unethical about a potential adversarial relationship between” two attorneys who once worked at the same firm, David Strom pointed out on HotAir.com. But one might hope that the president and White House would be especially mindful of keeping their fingerprints off matters involving Hunter Biden and government investigations, while minimizing potential conflicts. That doesn’t appear to be the case.

“The president thumbed his nose at” the IRS whistleblowers “with the nomination of his son’s former law partner to an agency overseeing their whistleblower cases,” an attorney for one of the IRS agents told The New York Post while also urging Mr. Dellinger to recuse himself from the matter.

The idea that there could be political shenanigans and favoritism going on with the Hunter Biden legal probes is met with a combination of derision and indignation from the White House and many Democrats. But how long can they suppress curiosity and realism in the face of so many coincidences involving Hunter Biden’s shady dealings?