Robert Hur defends recommendation not to prosecute Joe Biden over classified documents

President Joe Biden had “eight million reasons” to break the rules on the handling of classified documents, Republican congressman Jim Jordan said at Wednesday’s testimony by former special counsel Robert Hur in front of the House Judiciary Committee at Capitol Hill.

Mr Hur, who resigned from the justice department last week, appeared as a private citizen to answer questions from the judiciary committee about the findings of his controversial February report on his investigation into Mr Biden’s handling of classified documents.

Mr Jordan, serving as chair of the hearing, put it to the former special counsel that money received for a memoir of his time as vice-president was sufficient motivation for Mr Biden to have unlawfully retain classified information.

“Eight million dollars! Joe Biden had eight million reasons to break the rules. He knew the rules, but he broke them for eight million dollars of a book advance.”

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In laying out the timeline of Mr Hur’s engagement by attorney general Merrick Garland, Mr Jordan told the hearing that the special prosecutor, appointed by then president Donald Trump as attorney for Maryland in 2018, had interviewed 147 witnesses and studied seven million documents over the course of an investigation.

Much of it revolved around a five-hour interview to which Mr Biden had voluntarily agreed during his presidency.

In February, Mr Hur released the 380-page report with a recommendation not to prosecute the president. A specific observation contained within the report – that the president would, in a trial situation, present “as he did in our interview as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” – created a major controversy and provoked an angry, nationally televised rebuttal from Mr Biden that evening.

The wording of Mr Hur’s depiction angered Democrats while the decision not to prosecute the president was depicted by Republicans as a clear example of double standards within the department of justice. Much of Wednesday morning’s debate and questioning consisted of entrenched opinion and counteraccusation from the congress members, who for three hours questioned Hur during their five-minute allotted time slots.

“My task was to determine whether the president retained or disclosed national defence information ‘wilfully’- meaning, knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids,” Mr Hur asserted in his opening statement.

“I could not make that determination without assessing the president’s state of mind. For that reason, I had to consider the president’s memory and overall mental state, and how a jury likely would perceive his memory and mental state in a criminal trial.”

Democratic congressman Adam Schiff (California) took issue with Mr Hur’s assertion that he had not disparaged the president, telling the former prosecutor: “But of course you did disparage the president in terms you had to know would have a maximum political impact. You understood your report would be public, right? You chose a general pejorative reference to the president ... you understood you ignite a political firestorm with that language.”

Florida Republican Matt Gaetz quoted an answer Mr Biden gave a White House press conference on February 8th in which he said he had not shared classified information with anyone: Mr Hur’s investigation had found an audio recording in which Mr Biden told his ghostwriter about the documents.

“That is inconsistent with the findings based on my report,” Mr Hur agreed.

“Yeah, it’s a lie, is what regular people would say,” Mr Gaetz said.

The Democratic line of questioning revolved around the contrast between President Biden’s voluntary co-operation with the Hur investigation and the obstructive behaviour of former president Trump during the investigation by special counsel Jack Smith.

Declining to entertain any question that strayed into the arena of hypotheticals, Mr Hur rigidly referred to the terms of his report. He explicitly stated that his report fell short of an exoneration of the president.

Much of Mr Hur’s testimony required him to listen in neutral silence to pontification from both sides of the political spectrum. Republican congressman Kelly Armstrong put it to Mr Hur that over the past three election cycles, only three people ran for president: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

“All three of them have been accused of mishandling classified documents. Only one of them has been prosecuted. That’s what the American people see.”

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