CNBC's "Squawk Alley" team reports on new comments from Attorney General William Barr about seizing voting machines and Hunter Biden, President-elect Joe Biden's son. For access to live and exclusive video from CNBC subscribe to CNBC PRO: [ Ссылка ]
Outgoing Attorney General William Barr said Monday that he saw no reason for a special counsel to take over the criminal investigation of Hunter Biden, son of President-elect Joe Biden, undercutting President Donald Trump yet again.
Trump has mulled pushing the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel for the probe, which is focused on Hunter Biden’s taxes, and which is currently being handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware.
“To the extent that there’s an investigation, I think that it’s being handled responsibly and professionally within the department,” Barr said at a news conference, two days before his resignation from the Department of Justice takes effect.
“And to this point I have seen no reason to appoint a special counsel, and I see no reason to do so before I leave,” Barr said.
“If I thought a special counsel was the right tool, I would name one, but I haven’t.”
Barr also said that he hopes the Biden administration will handle the Hunter Biden probe “responsibly.”
Appointing a special counsel is seen as one means to prevent Joe Biden or other officials in his administration from exerting any pressure on the U.S. attorney’s office to go easy on Hunter Biden.
Special counsels are appointed by the attorney general to investigate a person or issue when federal prosecutors or Justice Department divisions have a conflict of interest if they handled the probe.
The incoming acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen last week refused to say whether he would appoint a special counsel for the Hunter Biden investigation.
Joe Biden has said that he will not interfere in the decision-making of federal prosecutors.
“It’s not my Justice Department. It’s the people’s Justice Department,” Biden said in a recent interview.
Barr submitted his resignation last week after infuriating Trump by contradicting the president’s claim that he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden as a result of massive ballot fraud.
Barr had said in an interview with The Associated Press that the DOJ had not seen any evidence to warrant reversing Biden’s election.
On Monday, Barr said he was commenting in that interview on whether there was systemic or broad-based voting fraud.
“I stand by that statement,” he said.
Barr during the same news conference contradicted Trump’s suggestion that Russia was not responsible for the so-called SolarWinds massive hack of U.S. government agencies. Barr said the hack “certainly appears to be the Russians.”
Trump over the weekend claimed that the hack may have been the work of China. But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, before the president weighed in on Twitter, that, “I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
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