Special counsel in Biden documents case takes heat from both parties
ments in his 345-page report that questioned Biden’s age and mental competence but recommended no criminal charges for the 81-year-old president, finding insufficient evidence to make a case stand up in court.
“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 provides 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 hardfought 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 he said he was unfamiliar with the paper trail for some of the sensitive documents he handled.
The hearing played out just hours before Biden claimed the Democratic nomination and Trump was on the cusp of becoming the GOP standard-bearer. 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. And Hur was the rare witness vilified all around, by Republicans angry over his decision not to charge the president, and by Democrats for his unflattering commentary about Biden.
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.
Democrats started off their questioning by hitting hard at the contrast between Biden and Trump, focusing more on the latter’s criminal case. Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the ranking Democrat, asked whether Biden’s willingness to comply with investigators and turn over documents contributed to the decision not to charge him.
“That was a factor in our analysis,” Hur said.
But the Democrats quickly bored into Hur, who was handpicked by Biden’s own attorney general, suggesting he was a political partisan doing Republican bidding via his written slights about Biden’s age and memory. Hur took issue with the characterization.
“Politics played no part whatsoever in my investigative steps, my decisions and the words that in I put in my report,” Hur responded.
Republicans, meanwhile, insisted Trump was being unfairly singled out and vilified, questioning how the two cases were really all that different.
Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., called it a “glaring double standard.”
“Donald Trump’s being prosecuted for exactly the same act that you documented Joe Biden committed,” he told Hur.
But there were major differences between the two probes. Biden’s team returned the documents after they were discovered, and the president cooperated with the investigation by voluntarily sitting for an interview and consenting to searches of his homes. Trump, by contrast, is accused of enlisting the help of aides and lawyers to conceal the documents from the government and seeking to have potentially incriminating evidence destroyed.