Special counsel defends Biden report
Hur spars with House panel, says his work was fair
WASHINGTON — Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated President Biden over the handling of classified documents, on Tuesday fiercely defended the disparaging assessment of the president’s mental state included in his final report — and his decision not to charge Biden with a crime.
Hur, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about his polarizing 345-page report, cast himself as an impartial arbiter. He said he had expressed concerns about Biden’s memory because he needed to justify not bringing a case against the president after some evidence showed he had willfully retained sensitive material from his vice presidency.
“I resolved to do the work as I did all my work for the department: fairly, thoroughly, and professionally,” he said in his opening statement.
Hur, a registered Republican who has been slammed by Biden’s allies for including his politically damaging assessment of Biden’s memory, showed little emotion during the hearing, but reacted angrily when a Democrat suggested he had “smeared” the president to bolster former president Donald Trump.
“Partisan politics played no part whatsoever in my work,” said Hur, 51, a former Trump Justice Department official whose appointment had been lauded by some Democrats who praised his work as a prosecutor in Maryland.
About an hour before Hur testified, Democrats on the congressional panel released a lightly redacted transcript of the five-hour interview Hur and his team conducted with Biden. It offered a more nuanced portrayal than the special counsel’s damning description of the 81year-old president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
While the 258-page transcript showed that on several occasions the president fumbled with dates and the sequence of events, he otherwise appeared clearheaded, with the kind of gaps in recollection not uncommon among people interviewed about events that transpired years earlier.
But Biden did have difficulty recalling specific dates, most strikingly when he fumbled in remembering the day his son Beau — who succumbed to cancer in 2015 — died.
On Tuesday, it was Hur’s turn to answer tough questions.
For more than four enervating hours, he sat at the witness table as alternating Democrats and Republicans pelted him with angry questions, pausing only to berate one another, or to deliver high-volume partisan speeches as Hur perched on the edge of his chair.
The stakes of Tuesday’s hearing were high even as Biden gave a fiery defense of his presidency during his State of the Union speech last week that seemed to address some of the concerns about age and mental fitness raised by the special counsel.
Hur, who began by saying he would not comment beyond the contents of the report, offered little succor to either side.
He repeatedly refused to accept the Republican argument that Biden’s actions were comparable to the indictment against Trump in the Florida documents case.
His report pointed to “several material distinctions,” including that the president cooperated with the investigation into his handling of classified documents whereas Trump repeatedly resisted requests to return material from his time in office.
But Hur made a point of rejecting a suggestion by Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat, that he had exonerated Biden and he did little to mask his disapproval of Biden’s handling of sensitive materials that were found in several unsecured locations, including his garage in Delaware.
“I did not exonerate him; that word does not appear in the report,” Hur said, a line that is likely to be seized upon by Trump and his supporters in the coming weeks.
Democrats kicked off the hearing by playing a highlight reel of Trump’s own verbal miscues and memory lapses — and included a clip in which he said he did not remember saying he had a great memory.
Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, accused Republicans of focusing on Biden’s mental fitness, instead of Trump’s praise for authoritarian leaders and recent meeting with Victor Orban, the far-right leader of Hungary.
But Hur did not back down from the report’s characterization of the president.
When Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, accused Hur of choosing “a general pejorative” to describe Biden’s mental state, Hur shot back by saying he would not “shape” and “sanitize” his report for political purposes.