Special counsel who investigated Biden strongly defends the report

Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated President Biden, on Tuesday fiercely defended the disparaging assessment of the president’s mental state included in his final report — and his decision not to charge Mr. Biden with a crime.

Mr. Hur, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about his polarizing 345-page report, cast himself as an impartial referee. He said he raised concerns about Mr. Biden’s memory because he had to justify not bringing a case against Mr. Biden after some evidence showed the president had deliberately withheld sensitive material from his vice presidency.

“I decided to do the work the way I did all my work for the department: honestly, thoroughly and professionally,” he said in his opening statement.

Mr. Hur, a registered Republican who has been criticized by Mr. Biden’s allies for including his politically damaging assessment of Mr. Biden’s memory, showed little emotion during the hearing but reacted angrily when a Democrat suggested he president had ‘smeared’. support Mr. Trump.

“Partisan politics did not play any role in my work,” said Hur, 51, a former Trump Justice Department official whose appointment was praised by some Democrats who praised his work as a prosecutor in Maryland.

About an hour before Mr. Hur testified, Democrats on the congressional panel released a lightly edited transcript of the five-hour interview that Mr. Hur and his team conducted with Mr. Biden. It offered a more nuanced picture than the special counsel’s scathing description of the 81-year-old president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Although the 258-page transcript showed that the president had on several occasions tampered with dates and the order of events, he otherwise appeared clear-headed, with the kind of gaps in memory that are not uncommon among people interviewed about events that took place years earlier. But Biden struggled to remember specific dates, most notably when he recalled the day his son Beau — who succumbed to cancer in 2015 — died.

On Tuesday it was Mr. Hur’s turn to answer tough questions.

For more than four tense hours, he sat at the witness table as Democrats and Republicans alternated bombarding him with angry questions, pausing only to berate each other or make boisterous partisan speeches as Mr. Hur sat on the edge of his chair . .

The political dynamic of the hearing was basic, brutal and binary: Democrats defended Mr. Biden, a candidate considered too old by many Americans, while Republicans sought to support Mr. Trump and his indictment over the summer on charges that he had expressed illegally, tried to keep it to a minimum. retained documents and obstructed investigators.

The stakes of Tuesday’s hearing were high, even as Biden fervently defended his presidency during his State of the Union address last week, in which he appeared to allay some of the concerns about age and mental fitness raised by the special counsel expressed.

Mr. Hur, who began by saying he would not comment beyond the contents of the report, offered little support to either side.

He repeatedly refused to accept the Republican argument that Mr. Biden’s actions were similar to the charges against Mr. Trump in the Florida documents case. His report pointed out “several material differences,” including that Mr. Biden cooperated with the investigation into his handling of classified documents, while Mr. Trump repeatedly resisted requests to return materials from his time in office.

But Mr Hur made a point of dismissing a suggestion from Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, that he had exonerated Mr Biden, and he did little to mask his disapproval of the way Mr Biden handled sensitive materials found in several unsecured documents. locations, including his garage in Delaware.

“I didn’t acquit him; that word does not appear in the report,” Mr. Hur said, a statement likely to be echoed by Mr. Trump and his supporters in the coming weeks.

Democrats kicked off the hearing by playing a highlight reel of Trump’s own verbal errors and memory lapses — adding a clip in which he said he didn’t remember having a great memory.

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, accused Republicans of focusing on Mr. Biden’s mental fitness, rather than Mr. Trump’s praise for authoritarian leaders and recent meeting with Victor Orban, Hungary’s far-right leader.

“It’s not a memory test for President Biden,” he said. “It’s a memory test for all of America. Do we recognize fascism? Do we recognize Nazism? Communism and totalitarianism?”

But Mr. Hur did not shy away from the report’s characterization of the president.

When Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, accused Mr. Hur of choosing “a blanket pejorative” to describe Mr. Biden’s mental state, Mr. Hur fired back, saying he would not “shape” his report ” and “purify” for Mr. Biden’s mental state. political purposes.

“You can’t tell me you’re so naive to think your words wouldn’t have started a political firestorm,” said Mr. Schiff, one of the managers of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “You understood how they would be manipulated.”

Mr. Hur did not dispute the claim by Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that Mr. Biden kept the documents to profit from a memoir he wrote after leaving office in 2017. Counsel said he agreed with that “assessment.”

Still, he repeatedly refused to endorse Republican claims that Mr. Biden would have been charged with a crime had he been able to remember his actions — and rejected their claims that his mishandling of documents was similar to Mr. Trump’s.

When a Republican committee member asked Mr. Hur whether his decision not to prosecute Mr. Biden created a new paradigm that made it acceptable to bring home “secrets,” he replied dryly: “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Mr. Hur said that Mr. Garland, who has come under intense fire for arresting him, did not pressure him to make changes to his report or request changes.

Mr. Hur gave his testimony as a private citizen and not as an employee of the Department of Justice. As of Monday, he resigned as special counsel and will be represented by a private attorney, William A. Burck, according to a department spokesman, who did not explain Mr. Hur’s reason for doing so.

Mr. Burck, a former deputy White House counsel under George W. Bush who has deep networks in Republican Washington, sat behind Mr. Hur during the hearing.