Hur gets hit with left-right combo
Both sides seize on parts of talk
Former special counsel Robert Hur stoked blowback from all sides during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.
Left and right latched onto their favorite snippets of the nearly 5-hour-long testimony to zing the other side.
From the left, Dan Pfeiffer, exsenior adviser to former President Barack Obama, claimed “Robert Hur is working very hard to say nothing positive or exculpatory about President Biden, which might have something to do with the fact that he was prepared for this hearing by GOP political operatives.”
But conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza was upset that Hur didn’t charge the president. “It’s quite obvious from Robert Hur’s testimony and the accompanying documentation that what Biden did with classified documents was far WORSE than what Trump did. Biden had them much longer, stored them more carelessly in multiple locations, and used them for personal gain!”
‘No opinions’
Hur insisted that nothing in his report opined on Biden’s fitness for office.
“Did you say anywhere in your report that you thought not only would he be unfit to handle his own finances, but he’d be unfit for public office?” Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) asked.
“My report did not include any opinions on those issues,” Hur replied.
Hur also confirmed his report did not wade in on guardianship when asked by Ivey.
‘Aren’t consistent’
After the hearing concluded, Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) contended that Hur’s findings didn’t quite add up.
“I think the report and the conclusion aren’t really consistent with each other,” Armstrong said on CNN.
He noted that Biden had decades of experience in high levels of government and access to a cadre of lawyers and advisers that would have likely told him how to properly handle classified information.
“I think we need answers why there’s a two-tier justice system and why . . . all three of the last three presidential candidates have met the same exact underlying elements of the crime and only one of them has been prosecuted,” Armstrong went on.
Host Jake Tapper pressed him about the obstruction aspect in Trump’s case, but Armstrong responded by recalling the destruction of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
‘Files were mine’
A notable exchange from the transcript of Hur’s Oct. 8 interview with Biden about documents the president kept at his Wilmington, Del., lake house:
HUR: “The materials in here, are they — were they official, work-related, personal, a mix?”
BIDEN: “They were mine. Whatever the hell they were, they were mine . . . Whether they were official, not official, they were mine.”
Later, after Biden points out one of the documents is “a fundraising from 2020 campaign,” he tells Hur, “that is something, if you ever run for office, you’ve got to keep.”
“That will never happen, sir,” Hur said.
Biden answered: “That’s what I said!”
‘Bad day for Joe’
National Review writer and attorney Jeff Blehar concluded that either way, it was a bad day for the White House:
“I notice a lot of ‘online message-oriented’ Democrats trying to push the idea that the Hur testimony has been anything other than terrible for Biden (and very good for Hur, a solid and sober witness), well past the point of hackery into sweaty meth-fueled delusion. This ain’t it.”
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) bristled at the narrative pushed by Republicans about Biden’s cognitive state.
“That’s disrespectful of senior people with any kind of memory disability. Lots of seniors have memory disability, but they’re not senile,” Cohen said, calling some of the attacks on Biden “shameful.”
“Joe Biden is a competent, good president who knows American values!”