Biden probe turns into proxy campaign battle
WASHINGTON >> Lawmakers turned a Tuesday hearing on President Joe Biden's handling of classified documents into a proxy battle between the Democratic president and Republican front-runner Donald Trump, as a newly released transcript of Biden's testimony last fall showed that he repeatedly insisted he never meant to retain classified information after he left the vice presidency.
Special counsel Robert Hur, testifying for more than four hours before the House Judiciary Committee, stood steadfastly by the assessments in his 345page 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 provide a more textured picture of the roughly yearlong investigation, filling in some 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 hard-fought 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 sensitive documents he handled.
The hearing played out as both Biden and 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.
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, 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, RElk Grove, 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.
Hur's report cited evidence that 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 Biden said he had just come across some classified documents at his home.
According to the transcript, Biden told 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.
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 would see the light of the day.
“The need to show my work was especially strong here,” 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, 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.