Wednesday Reads: Robert Hur Is a Lying Liar.

Good Day!!

The self-satisfied Mr. Robert Hur

Yesterday Robert Hur testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Before his appearance, Hur resigned from the Department of Justice and reportedly worked with Republicans in preparing his testimony. Hur and his Republican pals made every effort to make Biden look bad, but Democrats were well prepared to counter those efforts. And, unfortunately for Hur, the transcript of his interviews with Biden was also released yesterday.

You probably recall that Hur’s final report included gratuitous claims about President Biden’s age and cognitive abilities. Some observers have compared Hur’s behavior with that of James Comey’s attack on Hillary Clinton just before the 2016 election. Fortunately, we are months away from the 2024 vote.

Molly Jong-Fast at MSNBC: Robert Hur took a page from the James Comey playbook — and made it worse.

I remember where I was on Oct. 28, 2016, the day James Comey released his letter. I was at a health food restaurant with a Republican friend of mine. “This is going to lose her the election,” I told my friend. I felt like I was going to throw up. I knew what a Donald Trump presidency would mean for women, for all of us.

“Don’t be silly,” said my friend, who I suspect later voted for Trump. The New York Times had the story on the front page: “Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton’s Campaign.” On Nov. 8, 2016, Clinton lost the election to Trump 304 to 227. The Comey letter had created just enough muddiness to make it seem like both candidates were ethically challenged. It was the false equivalence that Trump was able to ride to the White House. Data guru Nate Silver wrote that the Comey letter “was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College.” Not only did Comey make Trump president but then he wrote numerous very tedious books. He became a resistance hero, riding his regret all the way to the bank.

Fast-forward to Feb. 8, 2024, when Republican special counsel Robert Hur released his 345-page report. The report is being seen by some as an exoneration, saying that no criminal charges are warranted in the classified documents case against President Joe Biden. But Hur, who used to work for the Trump administration, couldn’t let Biden off the hook entirely, especially 269 days before an election. Hur, a member of a Republican Party that now largely works as a campaign arm for the former president, delivered the goods for his party. Sure, he found no legal basis to charge Biden, but but but… Hur proceeded to editorialize ad nauseam about Biden’s mental acuity, delivering right-wing talking points up on a platter. He wrote, “[At] trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Saying you don’t remember stuff in a deposition is pretty much standard. For example, Dr. Anthony Fauci said “I don’t recall” 174 times during a deposition about alleged collusion between the Biden administration and social media platforms — but because there isn’t a narrative about Fauci’s age crafted by Trump World, no one thought this had anything to do with his mental acuity….

Lies, by Edel Rodriguez

Hur’s report was a partisan hit job, but it didn’t matter, as former Obama chief of staff Jim Messina tweeted: “Let’s be clear — the special counsel isn’t a dummy and we should be very careful not to take the bait after Comey pulled this in 2016. Hur, a lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn’t have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically.”

Joe Scarborough put it even more succinctly: “He couldn’t indict Biden legally, so he tried to indict Biden politically.” Yet again, a Republican special counsel had put his finger on the scale, just like Comey did in 2016. Hur isn’t a neurologist; he has no idea what Biden’s mental acuity is. Former attorney general Eric Holder condemned the report: “Special Counsel Hur report on Biden classified documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions,” he posted on X, adding: “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised.” Shame on Attorney General Merrick Garland for letting this partisan hit job be released.

Some background information on Hur from AP (written before yesterday’s testimony): Who is Robert Hur? A look at the special counsel due to testify on Biden classified documents case.

The special counsel who impugned the president’s age and competence in his report on how Joe Biden handled classified documents will himself be up for questioning this week.

Robert Hur is scheduled to testify before a congressional committee on Tuesday as House Republicans try to keep the spotlight on unflattering assessments of Biden.

Some Biden aides and allies have suggested that Hur, a Republican appointed to his role as U.S. attorney by Donald Trump, is a political partisan. Hur’s defenders say he has shown throughout his career that his work is guided by only facts and the law — not politics.

A review of Hur’s professional life shows he’s no stranger to politically charged investigations. He prosecuted former elected officials as Maryland’s chief federal law enforcement officer. And as a Justice Department official, he helped monitor special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election….

The Naked Truth and the Masked Lies, by Rosita Allinckx

Hur held one of the most powerful jobs in the Justice Department during a tumultuous time in the Trump administration, serving as the top aide to [Rod] Rosenstein, the department’s second-in-command.

As the principal associate deputy attorney general, Hur helped run day-to-day operations of the department in 2017 and early 2018. He also helped Rosenstein stay on top of Mueller’s progress in the Russia investigation. Hur held bi-weekly meetings with the special counsel’s team and reported back to Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general said in an interview.

Rosenstein said he hired Hur because he knew he would maintain a calm and steady demeanor and “approach cases in a nonpartisan way.”

Um . . . Sure, Jan. Read more background at the link.

Why did Hur resign from the DOJ before testifying? Doesn’t that seem suspicious?

Igor Deyrsh at Yahoo News: Biden special counsel Robert Hur’s resignation from DOJ makes his testimony “even more problematic.”

Hur, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who was tapped to lead the Biden probe by Attorney General Merrick Garland, formally stepped down one day before his Tuesday appearance at the request of Republicans led by Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. He drew criticism from Biden and the Democrats for criticizing the president’s memory in the report even as he declined to charge him.

Former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann explained that the Justice Department “cannot give instructions” to a former employee about what he “can and cannot testify to.”

“That makes it even more problematic from our perspective … if he was still a federal employee, DOJ would have to approve his testimony and they’d be involved in his appearance tomorrow,” a Democratic Judiciary Committee source told The Independent.

“It’s hard not to anticipate some real ugliness with Robert Hur’s testimony,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman. “He already showed his partisan colors in the inappropriate parts of his report. And he and the [Republicans] obviously contemplate he can vilify Biden now that he’s testifying as a ‘private citizen.’”

So it appears Hur’s motivation was to have the freedom to attack Biden without any DOJ influence on what he would say. Before I get to the testimony, here are some stories about Hur’s final report:

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic: How Hur Misled the Country on Biden’s Memory.

“First impressions stick,” writes Serwer. No matter that clarifications follow–it’s what people hear first that stays with them.

Five years ago, a partisan political operative with the credibility of a long career in government service misled the public about official documents in order to get Donald Trump the positive spin he wanted in the press. The play worked so well that a special counsel appointed to examine President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, Robert Hur, ran it again.

In 2019, then–Attorney General Bill Barr—who would later resign amid Trump’s attempts to suborn the Justice Department into backing his effort to seize power after losing reelection—announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to indict Trump on allegations that he had assisted in a Russian effort to sway the 2016 election and had obstructed an investigation into that effort. Mueller’s investigation led to indictments of several Trump associates, but he later testified that Justice Department policy barred prosecuting a sitting president, and so indicting Trump was not an option. Barr’s summary—which suggested that Trump had been absolved of any crimes—was so misleading that it drew a rebuke not only from Mueller himself but from a federal judge in a public-records lawsuit over material related to the investigation. That judge, Reggie Walton, wrote in 2020 that the discrepancies “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary.”

Truth and Lies, by Louise Fletcher

As my colleague David Graham wrote at the time, the ploy worked. Trump claimed “total exoneration,” and mainstream outlets blared his innocence in towering headlines. Only later did the public learn that Mueller’s report had found “no criminal conspiracy but considerable links between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, and strongly suggested that Trump had obstructed justice.”

Now this same pattern has emerged once again, only instead of working in the president’s favor, it has undermined him. Hur, a former U.S. attorney in the Trump administration, was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden for potential criminal wrongdoing after classified documents were found at his home. (Trump has been indicted on charges that he deliberately mishandled classified documents after storing such documents at his home in Florida and deliberately showing them off to visitors as “highly confidential” and “secret information.”)

In Hur’s own summary of his investigation, he concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” even absent DOJ policy barring prosecution of a sitting president. But that part was not what caught the media’s attention. Rather it was Hur’s characterization of Biden as having memory problems, validating conservative attacks on the president as too old to do the job. The transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden, released yesterday by House Democrats, suggest that characterization—politically convenient for Republicans and the Trump campaign—was misleading.

Read the rest at the Atlantic.

And how did Hur mislead?

Andrew Prokop at Vox: Robert Hur’s report exaggerated Biden’s memory issues.

When special counsel Robert Hur released his report last month explaining why he wouldn’t charge President Joe Biden with mishandling classified documents, his claim that Biden displayed a “poor memory” and “diminished faculties” in their interview received enormous attention.

But now, the full transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden have been released — and they make Hur’s claims about Biden’s memory appear cherry-picked and exaggerated.

Biden sat for more than five hours with Hur’s team over two days. In that time, he said he did not recall specifics about how particular boxes ended up in his residences or offices after his vice presidency. But he engaged at length about his process for handling classified information and many other topics.

Hur’s claim that Biden had demonstrated some sort of general “poor memory” hangs almost entirely on mix-ups by Biden about in what specific year several years-old events occurred. The transcript makes clear Biden remembers all those events. But it seems Biden just doesn’t pay a lot of attention to which specific year stuff happened in.

So why did Hur hype this up so much?

His report and his House testimony Tuesday suggest one reason. Hur proposed a theory, outlined in the report, about Biden’s deliberate wrongdoing — that Biden kept classified documents about Afghanistan policy deliberations to help burnish his reputation and legacy.

However, Hur couldn’t prove this theory, in part because Biden said he couldn’t recall why these documents were in his garage. Hence, the special counsel bashed Biden for his “poor memory” — knowing full well how that would play when the report became public.

Truth Hidden Between the Lies, by Jeff Klena

This is a good article, and it also deals with Hur’s testimony and how Democrats’ countered his claims. After breaking down problems with Hur’s report, Prokop quotes Adam Schiff:

Hur’s report looks less like a smoking gun proving Biden’s supposed age-related decline, and more like dirty pool, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) argued.

“You know this, I know this, there is nothing more common with a witness of any age, when asked about events that are years old, than to say ‘I do not recall.’ Indeed, they’re instructed by their attorney to do that, if they have any question about it,” Schiff said.

Hur argued back that his consideration of Biden’s memory was relevant to his charging decisions, and that he was perfectly willing, indeed required, to explain his thinking on that topic in his report to the attorney general.

Schiff disputed this. “What is in the rules is, you don’t gratuitously do things to prejudice the subject of an investigation when you’re declining to prosecute. You don’t gratuitously add language that you know will be useful in a political campaign.”

“You were not born yesterday,” Schiff added. “You understood exactly what you were doing. It was a choice.”

Why on earth did Merrick Garland appoint this guy?

Chris Megerian at AP: Hur said Biden couldn’t recall when his son died. The interview transcript is more complicated.

The White House knew it had a political problem on its hands when a special counsel report questioned President Joe Biden’s memory last month, but Biden saw a much more personal affront as well.

Robert Hur, who had been appointed to investigate whether Biden mishandled classified documents, wrote that the president couldn’t recall in an interview with prosecutors the date when his adult son, Beau, died of cancer. It was a shocking contention about a keystone event in Biden’s life, and it fed into questions about whether the 81-year-old president is fit to serve another term….

Hur didn’t ask the president about his son’s death; Biden brought it up himself during a discussion about how he stored documents at a rental home in Virginia after leaving the vice president’s office in 2017.

And Biden recalled the specific date that Beau died, although he briefly wondered aloud about the year as the conversation toggled between various events.

“What month did Beau die?” Biden mused. “Oh, God, May 30th.”

A White House lawyer interjected by saying, “2015.”

“Was it 2015 he had died?” Biden asked. When someone responded affirmatively, the president added, “It was 2015.” [….]

Hur, in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, said his report’s discussion of Biden’s memory was “necessary and accurate and fair” because his state of mind was an important part of evaluating whether he committed a crime.

“I did not sanitize my explanation nor did I disparage the president unfairly,” he said.

What an asshole! As Adam Serwer wrote, Hur made sure that the first impression he gave of Biden’s interviews was on of a doddering old man with cognitive issues.

Fraud, by Carl Bowlby

Yesterday, Eric Swalwell got Hur to admit that during one of the interviews he characterized Biden as having a “photographic memory!” From HuffPost, via Yahoo News: Robert Hur Admits Telling Biden He Seemed To Have ‘Photographic Recall.’

Although special counsel Robert Hur impugned Joe Biden’s memory in his investigation over whether the president mishandled classified documents, he actually told Biden that he appeared “to have a photographic understanding and recall.”

The comment, which appears in transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden, did not make it into Hur’s final report. Hur concluded in the report that Biden should not be charged over the documents, but made sure to mention his doubts about the president’s memory.

But Hur admitted he made those comments during an exchange with Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) during his Tuesday meeting with the House Judiciary Committee.

The California Democrat asked Hur about a comment that appears on “Day 1, Page 47” of the transcript.

“You said to President Biden, ‘You appear to have a photographic understanding and recall of the House,’” Swalwell said. “Did you say that to President Biden?”

Hur conceded that “those words do appear on Page 47 of the transcript.”

Swalwell pressed further.

“‘Photographic’ is what you said, is that right?” he asked.

“That word does appear on Page 47 of the transcript,” Hur responded.

“Never appeared in your report, though. Is that correct? The word ‘photographic’?” Swalwell asked.

“It does not appear in my report,” Hur said.

Interesting that he chose to leave that out.

Andrew Weissman and Ryan Goodman at Just Security: The Real “Robert Hur Report” (Versus What You Read in the News).

The Special Counsel Robert Hur report has been grossly mischaracterized by the press. The report finds that the evidence of a knowing, willful violation of the criminal laws is wanting. Indeed, the report, on page 6, notes that there are “innocent explanations” that Hur “cannot refute.” That is but one of myriad examples we outline in great detail below of the report repeatedly finding a lack of proof. And those findings mean, in DOJ-speak, there is simply no case. Unrefuted innocent explanations is the sine qua non of not just a case that does not meet the standard for criminal prosecution – it means innocence. Or as former Attorney General Bill Barr and his former boss would have put it, a total vindication (but here, for real).

But even without the prompting of a misleading “summary” by Barr, the press has gotten the lede wrong. This may be because of a poorly worded (we’re being charitable) thesis sentence on page 1 of Hur’s executive summary. Hur writes at the outset: “Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” You have to wait for the later statements that what the report actually says is there is insufficient evidence of criminality, innocent explanations for the conduct, and affirmative evidence that Biden did not willfully withhold classified documents. Put another way, that same sentence about “our investigation uncovered evidence” could equally apply to Mike Pence, who had classified documents at his home, which is similarly some “evidence” of a crime, but also plainly insufficient to remotely establish criminality.

The press incorrectly and repeatedly blast out that the Hur report found Biden willfully retained classified documents, in other words, that Biden committed a felony; with some in the news media further trumpeting that the Special Counsel decided only as a matter of discretion not to recommend charges.

Read a details analysis of the report at the link.

Charlie Savage has a very detailed comparison of Robert Hur’s claims about Biden’s memory and the transcript of the interviews: How the Special Counsel’s Portrayal of Biden’s Memory Compares With the Transcript. It’s too long and detailed to excerpt, but it’s worth a read if you’re interested.

One more article that addresses yesterday’s testimony:

Jeremy Herb and Marshall Cohen at CNN: Takeaways from Robert Hur’s testimony on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.

Former special counsel Robert Hur appeared before Congress on Tuesday to explain his investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents – which led to no charges against the president but plenty of consternation among Democrats when Hur described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in his report.

While Hur came ready to defend his investigation, outlining a specific, legal case — or lack thereof – the members of the House Judiciary Committee were fighting a battle over the much more subjective political consequences to Hur’s report just months before the 2024 presidential election.

Truth Lies at the Bottom of the Well, by Frances MacDonald

Republicans attacked Biden as they pressed Hur on his decision not to prosecute the president, while Democrats criticized Hur for his comments about Biden’s memory – while also focusing much of their attention on former President Donald Trump and the differences in the former president’s classified documents case, which led to an indictment last year.

Hur tried his best to stick to what was in his report, even as he was pushed to go further either to criticize Biden – or to declare his innocence.

Hur was clear on Tuesday that he did not want to play ball with Republicans on whether Biden is “senile,” given the former special counsel’s decision to describe Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” in his investigative report.

“Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘senile’ as exhibiting a decline of cognitive ability, such as memory, associated with old age,” Republican Rep. Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin said. “Mr. Hur, based on your report, did you find that the president was senile?”

“I did not. That conclusion does not appear in my report,” Hur replied emphatically.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat, tussled with Hur over his conclusions, claiming Hur “exonerated” Biden. But Hur immediately took issue with the term during a tense exchange in which they both repeatedly cut each other off.

“This lengthy, expensive an independent investigation resulted in a complete exoneration of President Joe Biden for every document you discussed in your report, you found insufficient evidence that the president violated any laws about possession or retention of classified materials,” Jayapal said.

“I need to go back and make sure that I take note of a word that you used, ‘exoneration,’” Hur said. “That is not a word that is used in my report and that is not a part of my task as a prosecutor.”

“You exonerated him,” Jayapal retorted.

“I did not exonerate him,” Hur said. “That word does not appear in the report.”

Okay then. But he didn’t charge him either. What can I say. Hur is just an asshole. Also, please note that Hur was question about whether he would accept a role in a second Trump administration, and he refused to answer. We can only hope that this controversy will be forgotten by the time we get to November.

More stories to check out today:

Lisa Needham at Public Notice: “Trump Employee 5” details Trump’s mob-like management style.

AP: Judge dismisses some charges against Trump in the Georgia 2020 election interference case.

CNN: Georgia judge says he’s on track to rule this week on whether to remove DA Fani Willis from Trump election case.

Allison Quinn at The Daily Beast: Putin Recalls Trump Acting Like Jealous GF in Private.

HuffPost: Donald Trump Flips Out At Democrats’ Mocking Montages With Massive Self-Own.

David Graham at The Atlantic: Trump Repeats Obama’s Mistake. Political parties suffer when their focus narrows to the presidency.

Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast: ‘Make the RNC White Again’: GOP Ends Minority Outreach. Program.

Martin Pengelly at The Guardian: Brett Kavanaugh knows truth of alleged sexual assault, Christine Blasey Ford says in book.

That’s it for me. What other stories have caught your interest today?