Hearing turns into proxy battle
“What I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe,“Mr. Hur said. “I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly.”
The transcript of hours of interviews between Mr. 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 Mr. Hur’s and Mr. 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 Mr. Trump, particularly in a hard-fought election year.
While Mr. 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 as both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump were on the cusp of claiming their parties’ 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. And Mr. 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 Mr. Biden.
Republicans argued Mr. Biden was being given a pass by his own Justice Department and that Mr. Trump had been unfairly victimized by prosecutors. Democrats, for their part, stressed Mr. Biden’s cooperation in the investigation and strongly contrasted that with the separate criminal case against Mr. 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 Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, focusing more on the latter’s criminal case. Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the ranking Democrat, asked whether Mr. 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,” Mr. Hur said.
But the Democrats quickly bored into Mr. Hur, who was handpicked by Mr. Biden’s own attorney general, suggesting he was a political partisan doing Republican bidding via his written slights about Mr. Biden’s age and memory. Mr. 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,” Mr. Hur responded.
Republicans, meanwhile, insisted Mr. Trump was being unfairly singled out and vilified, questioning how the two cases were really all that different.
Rep. Tom McClintock, RCalif., called it a “glaring double standard.”
“Donald Trump’s being prosecuted for exactly the same act that you documented Joe Biden committed,” he told Mr. Hur.
But there were major differences between the two probes. Mr. 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. Mr. 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.
Mr. Hur’s report cited
evidence that Mr. Biden willfully held on to highly classified information and shared it with a ghostwriter, based on audio of the conversations between the two men in which Mr. Biden said he had just come across some classified documents at his home.
According to the transcript, Mr. Biden told Mr. Hur he did not recall the exchange, or that he had actually discovered any documents. He said if he had discussed anything questionable with the ghostwriter, it was in referring to a 20-page sensitive memo he had written to then- President Barack Obama in 2009 arguing against surging troops in Afghanistan that he wanted to ensure didn’t make it into publication.
Mr. Hur said he was aware of the need to explain in great detail why he’d decided not to charge the president and why the case didn’t meet the standard for criminal charges. Such explanations are common but usually kept confidential.
But there’s a tradition at the Justice Department to release such documents publicly and so as Hur was working on his report, he almost certainly would have understood that the document was going to see the light of the day.
“The need to show my work was especially strong here,” Mr. Hur said. “The attorney general had appointed me to investigate the actions of the attorney general’s boss, the sitting president of the United States. I knew that for my decision to be credible, I could not simply announce that I recommended no criminal charges and leave it at that. I needed to explain why.”
He added that “the evidence and the president himself put his memory squarely at issue.”
In his interviews, Mr. Biden repeatedly told prosecutors that he did not know how classified documents ended up at his home and former Penn Biden Center office in Washington.
“I have no idea,” he said. He also insisted that had he known they were there, he would have returned them to the government.
The president did acknowledge that he intentionally held on to his personal diaries — which officials said contained classified information. Mr. Biden insisted were his own property, a claim also asserted by previous presidents and vice presidents, and that he had a right to keep them.
He also acknowledged that he was “never that organized,” as prosecutors pressed him on why some of the documents were located in different places.
Mr. Hur, in his report, detailed how his findings about Mr. Biden were far different from those of special counsel Jack Smith about Mr. Trump, who has been charged with willfully retaining classified documents.
Mr. Trump hyped Tuesday as a “Big day in Congress for the Biden Documents Hoax,” while casting himself as being unfairly targeted. “The DOJ gave Biden, and virtually every other person and President, a free pass,“he said. ”Me, I’m still fighting!!!”
FBI agents searched Mr. Trump’s Florida estate in 2022 and removed boxes of documents marked as classified after he refused multiple requests from the National Archives to return them.
Mr. Biden, by his own admission in the interviews, has retained such a sprawling assortment of photos, documents and artifacts from his more than 50 years in public life that he can’t keep track of everything.