Congress’s hearing on Biden turns into proxy campaign battle

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers turned a Tuesday hearing on President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents into a proxy battle between the Democratic president and Republican front-runner Donald Trump, as a newly-released transcript of Biden’s testimony last fall showed that he repeatedly insisted he never meant to retain classified information after he left the vice presidency.

Special counsel Robert Hur, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, stood steadfastly by the assessments in his 345-page report that questioned Biden’s age and mental competence but recommended no criminal charges.

“What I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe,” Hur said. “I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly.”

The transcript of hours of interviews between Biden and the special counsel released Tuesday provide a more textured picture of the roughly yearlong investigation, filling in some of the gaps left by Hur’s and Biden’s accounting of the exchanges. But there was no guarantee the hearing or transcript would alter preconceived notions about the president, the special counsel who investigated him, or Trump, particularly in a hard-fought election year.

While Biden was adamant that he treated classified information seriously, the transcript shows that he was at times fuzzy about dates and details and said he was unfamiliar with the paper trail for some of the sensitive documents he handled.

The hearing played out as both Biden and Trump were on the cusp of claiming their party’s nominations, and the party lines calcified almost immediately over which leader meant to hang on to classified documents, or rather, who “willfully” retained them — and who didn’t.

Republicans argued Biden was being given a pass by his own Justice Department and that Trump had been unfairly victimized by prosecutors. Democrats, for their part, stressed Biden’s cooperation in the investigation and strongly contrasted that with the separate criminal case against Trump, who refused to return classified documents requested by the National Archives that he had at his Florida estate.

Trump hyped Tuesday as a “Big day in Congress for the Biden Documents Hoax,” while casting himself as being unfairly targeted.