HIGH-WIRE ACT FOR SPECIAL COUNSEL IN BIDEN DOCS PROBE
‘Unflappable’ Robert Hur will head investigation into president’s handling of state secrets.
Robert Hur, appointed on Thursday to oversee the investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, has two attributes that suit the task — years of prosecutorial experience and a vivid understanding of the perils inherent in high-wire special counsel investigations.
Attorney General Merrick Garland named Mr Hur, a former US attorney for Maryland, to lead the inquiry after the White House confirmed that a second set of classified materials had been uncovered inside a garage storage area at Mr Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.
Earlier, another set of documents was found at an office Mr Biden used after his vice presidency just before November’s mid-term elections.
Mr Hur, 49, was President Donald Trump’s pick to run the US attorney’s
This is a very different task than anything he’s done before.
FORMER DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL, ROD ROSENSTEIN
office in Maryland, where he earned bipartisan praise for his handling of violent crime and public corruption cases.
But it is his 11-month stint as the top aide to the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein — as Mr Rosenstein oversaw the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to investigate Mr Trump’s dealings with Russia — that might be most critical.
Hur helped run the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department at a time of major tumult: From mid-2017 to late 2018, Mr Rosenstein was under relentless political pressure, including threats of being fired by Mr Trump over his decision to appoint Mr Mueller, which the president considered a personal betrayal.
“We were coming under tremendous criticism from the commentators — and the president — and Rob kept his head down, pushed ahead and never lost his sense of humour,” Mr Rosenstein said after Mr Hur’s appointment was announced.
“This is a very different task than anything he’s done before,” Mr Rosenstein said, adding that he thought Mr Hur was the ideal pick. “Every special counsel starts with a sterling reputation, but no one finishes up that way.”
But Mr Hur’s crucible moment came later, after he left Mr Rosenstein’s staff to become the top prosecutor in Maryland.
Geoffrey Berman, the Trump-era US attorney in Manhattan, wrote about Mr Hur in his memoir, Holding the Line, which accuses the Justice Department under Mr Trump of trying to use prosecutors in Manhattan to support Mr Trump politically and pursue his critics.
According to Berman, the Justice Department pushed his office to investigate John Kerry, secretary of state in the Obama administration, who had angered Mr Trump by trying to preserve the nuclear deal he had negotiated with Iran.
After Berman’s office decided not to bring criminal charges against Mr Kerry, he wrote, Attorney General William Barr reassigned the matter to Mr Hur, who called Berman to ask about it. “I went through the whole thing, explained our reasons for declining, and urged Hur to do the same,” Berman wrote.
Mr Hur came to “the same conclusion we did, and the Kerry investigation just quietly died — as it should have,” he added.
That was not an aberration, officials said. Mr Hur made a point of ensuring that politics did not affect his office.
Aaron S J Zelinsky, who was one of four prosecutors to abruptly quit working on the prosecution of a longtime Trump ally, Roger Stone, accused senior officials of intervening in the Stone case to seek a lighter sentence. When he returned to the Maryland office, Mr Zelinsky found that Mr Hur treated him fairly and without rancour.
In selecting Hur, Attorney General Merrick Garland is continuing a pattern of asking current and former
Trump-appointed US attorneys to handle politically sensitive investigations — such as the inquiry into the president’s son, Hunter Biden — to allay any concerns about political bias.
Mr Garland said he decided to choose Mr Hur after a preliminary investigation into classified documents found at a Washington think tank and Mr Biden’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, prompted the appointment of a special counsel under department rules.
In November, Mr Garland offered much the same explanation for picking Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor, to oversee concurrent investigations into Mr Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his actions surrounding the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Mr Hur said he promised to “conduct the assigned investigation with fair, impartial and dispassionate judgment”.