Garland appoints special counsel
Hur served in Justice Department during Trump administration
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday appointed Robert Hur, a veteran prosecutor who worked in the Trump administration, as a special counsel to handle the investigation into how classified documents from President Joe Biden’s time as vice president ended up at his private office and home.
Hur, who previously served as the U. S. attorney for Maryland during the Trump administration, is responsible for investigating “the possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records discovered” at the office of Biden’s think tank in Washington and his residence in Wilmington, Del., according to an order Garland signed Thursday.
Hur, who also served as a top Justice Department official in the deputy attorney general’s office in 2017 and 2018, is authorized to prosecute any crimes arising from the inquiry or to refer matters for prosecution by federal attorneys in other jurisdictions, the order said.
The decision to select a special counsel to look into the handling of the documents, which include briefing materials on foreign countries, comes at an extraordinary moment for Garland, who in November tapped Jack Smith, a former war crimes and public corruption prosecutor, to lead the investigations into former President Donald Trump’s mishandling of government documents and his actions related to the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.
A senior department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the decision by Garland “was not taken lightly” but was required under department regulations as “a textbook example” of an investigation that necessitated a special counsel.
The appointment is intended to insulate the Justice Department from accusations of partisanship at a time when the new Republican majority in the House has embarked on an aggressive and open- ended investigation into what it claims is the Biden administration’s bias against the GOP.
Garland also filled in some, if
not all, of the gaps in the public timeline surrounding the discovery of both document caches.
Biden’s lawyers alerted the National Archives of the classified documents at the Washington office on Nov. 2, and National Archives officials referred the matter to the Justice Department two days later.
On Dec. 20, the Biden team alerted the Justice Department that it found more sensitive material, Garland said. A Biden lawyer also informed the department that one additional document had been recovered hours before Hur’s appointment, he said.
The White House said the Biden team notified the department immediately when it discovered documents and arranged for the government to take possession of them.
The process for selecting a special counsel began days after the National Archives contacted Garland’s staff.
On Nov. 14, the attorney general selected John Lausch, the U. S. attorney in Chicago, to conduct a preliminary assessment of the material to determine whether a counsel was needed.
Lausch, who stood next to Garland in impassive silence Thursday, told Garland on Jan. 5 that a special counsel was warranted.
Hur, who is a partner at the white- collar law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, was appointed by Trump as the U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland in 2018 and left that position at the end of the Trump administration.
The White House has acknowledged twice this week that Biden’s team had found batches of classified papers in two locations associated with him: in his former office at a think tank in Washington and in the garage of his home in Wilmington.
A batch of classified papers, which is said to have included briefing materials on foreign governments from Biden’s time as vice president, were found in November, as lawyers were closing down his office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington.
They alerted the National Archives, which retrieved them the next morning. National Archives officials then informed the Justice Department; Garland assigned the preliminary phase of the inquiry to Lausch, a Trump appointee, to blunt criticism that he was seeking to protect the Democratic president who appointed him.
Like Lausch, Hur was a political appointee of Trump. During the Trump administration, he was the top aide to the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, who was also a former U.S. attorney in Maryland.
But Hur had a significant career in an apolitical role as an assistant federal prosecutor in that office from 2007 to 2014. He then worked as a trial lawyer in private practice before returning to the Justice Department to assist Rosenstein.
According to a biography, Hur’s prosecutorial career included cases involving gang violence, gun offenses and drug trafficking, as well as white- collar crimes such as fraud, public corruption, tax offenses, hacking and intellectual property theft.
He also prosecuted highprofile domestic terrorism cases.
Hur graduated from Harvard College and Stanford Law School and clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the biography said.
He worked as an aide to Christopher Wray, now the FBI director, when Wray ran the Justice Department’s criminal division in the George W. Bush administration.