Hunter Biden’s Georgia victory

So, Hunter Biden is in the clear on Capitol Hill. No one in Congress will investigate the circumstances of Biden’s lucrative relationship with a corrupt Ukrainian energy company at a time when his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine corruption. No one in Congress will investigate Hunter Biden’s even more lucrative relationship with CEFC, the largest private energy company in China, at a time when his father was a key administration figure on China. No one will investigate indications that at various points, Hunter Biden intended for his father to get a cut of the money that came from shadowy foreign deals.

“It’s not a very rosy scenario from the standpoint of Congress looking into this,” said Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who faced intense Democratic opposition to his investigation of Biden’s finances. “It’s pretty much in the hands of the Department of Justice and investigative journalists.”

Good luck with the journalism part. When the Biden-Ukraine allegations were raised during President Trump’s first impeachment in the fall of 2019, many journalists unquestioningly accepted Joe Biden’s insistence that “there is not a shred of evidence of anything that was wrong.” Then, during the 2020 presidential campaign, when the New York Post reported that more evidence of Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings had emerged in the form of a discarded laptop, many in the press either ignored the story or actively attacked the Post. Social media did its part, too, with Twitter locking the paper’s account and Facebook limiting the story’s reach. So, it is probably not reasonable to expect the nation’s largest media outlets to dig into the Hunter Biden story.

As for the Justice Department, on Dec. 9, the Biden transition released a statement from Hunter Biden saying that he had just learned that the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware was investigating his taxes. “I take this matter very seriously, but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors,” Hunter Biden said. The release also included a statement from the transition that President-elect Joe Biden “is deeply proud of his son, who has fought through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger.”

It was notable that the world learned about the Hunter Biden investigation from Hunter Biden himself. Since the inquiry began in 2018, and all through the impeachment of 2019 and the election of 2020, the Justice Department never leaked the news, and journalists never discovered it. Had the story emerged during the campaign, it would have lent credence to the claim, by Trump and other Republicans, that there was something worth looking at in the Hunter Biden story, but the secret held.

Now comes a newly inaugurated President Biden and a Democratic administration, including a Justice Department that will be headed by Merrick Garland, Biden’s choice to become attorney general. Garland will face repeated calls from Republicans to appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden. Unless new evidence emerges, it seems likely Garland will refuse those calls. After all, his predecessor, Attorney General William Barr, in late December said the investigation was being handled “responsibly and professionally” by the Justice Department and that he saw “no reason to appoint a special counsel.” Garland can simply cite the Trump-appointed Barr as his authority for denying a special counsel.

Still, Republicans will argue, with some merit, that the special counsel situation will change the moment Biden takes the oath of office. A special counsel is called for when the Justice Department has a conflict of interest in an investigation. Once Biden gets his nominees through the Senate, every top official at Justice will have been appointed by the new president. Are they then supposed to oversee the investigation of the son of the man who appointed them? It’s not an open-and-shut question, but it is a question, and Republicans will ask it repeatedly.

Then there is the Senate, where the two leading Hunter Biden investigators, Johnson and fellow Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, had hoped to intensify their inquiry in 2021. Even if the GOP had kept control of the Senate, Johnson would have been term-limited out of his position as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He had hoped to continue as chairman of the subcommittee on investigations. Now, he will be the ranking minority member.

Even as chairman, Johnson ran into determined opposition not just from Democrats but from key agencies of the executive branch. For example, Johnson sought documents from the State Department, documents that would likely have revealed more about Hunter Biden’s international ties, and ended up with almost nothing. “I can’t tell you how frustrated I am at the lack of cooperation from the State Department,” Johnson said, adding that State “dragged their feet and did everything they could to hide the ball and not turn over what I believed were relevant documents to my committee and Sen. Grassley.”

The Biden inquiry deeply divided the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, now Chairman Gary Peters, accused Johnson of doing Russia’s bidding. “The faulty investigation pursued by Chairmen Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley is rooted in a known Russian disinformation effort intended to spur investigations into false allegations of corruption,” Peters and fellow Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden said in a statement last September.

It wasn’t true: Johnson based his investigation on U.S. government documents and testimony from witnesses such as former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski. It caused some ugly moments in the committee room. “You lied repeatedly!” Johnson said to Peters at a hearing in December. “You lied repeatedly to the press that I was spreading Russian disinformation, and that was an outright lie, and I told you to stop lying and you continued to do it.”

“Mr. Chairman, this is not about airing your grievances,” Peters shot back. “I don’t know what rabbit hole you’re running down right now.” And that was the way things went.

The Democratic accusations took their toll. Some Republican committee members, most notably Sen. Mitt Romney, had misgivings about continuing the investigation. (Romney suggested the Hunter Biden business was “not the legitimate role of government or Congress.”) Republicans quickly learned that going all-in on the investigation would mean a rough ride. “People viewed it as kind of an icky investigation and didn’t want to get their hands dirty on it,” Johnson said, “because you saw the treatment I got in the press for trying to uncover the truth.”

So now, Republicans can forget about the Senate, or the House, discovering anything new. The State Department will no longer need to drag its feet or hide the ball. Neither will any other agency of the executive branch.

That leaves the investigation entirely in the hands of David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware. Weiss was appointed by Trump in 2018 on the recommendation of Delaware’s two Democratic senators, Chris Coons and Tom Carper. Now, there will probably be a consensus that Weiss, who might normally be replaced with the coming of a new administration, stay in place to oversee the Hunter Biden inquiry. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed that [Weiss] is an honest broker and is doing a serious investigation,” said Johnson.

The one thing that is known about the Justice Department investigation is that not much is known about the investigation. And even if some resourceful journalist discovered something about it, other journalists might ignore it and social media might suppress it. It should be no surprise that, especially with the momentous events of the transition, the Hunter Biden matter has receded into the background.

But it hasn’t gone away. Because there is so much we do not know, the Hunter Biden question will hang over the new administration. It will hang over the Justice Department. It will hang over Congress. It will hang over the new president. But at some point, it seems likely the younger Biden’s problems will flare into public view again. And perhaps then, despite the incuriosity among so many highly placed people in Washington, the public will finally learn what happened.

Byron York is chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner and a Fox News contributor.