Former special counsel Robert Hur faced bipartisan criticism Tuesday during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on his findings regarding President Joe Biden’s retention of classified material after serving as Barack Obama’s vice president. Republicans wanted to know how Hur could conclude that criminal charges against Biden were not warranted when Special Counsel Jack Smith is prosecuting former President Donald Trump for substantially similar conduct. Democrats complained about Hur’s description of Biden as “a sympathetic, well-intentioned older man with a poor memory” and with “diminished faculties as he ages,” which they described as legally irrelevant and perhaps motivated by hope of a judicial nomination in a second Trump administration.
A 258-page transcript of the interview released before the hearing sheds light on this latest question. The transcript, which is based on hours of taped interviews with Biden that Hur and his staff conducted on Oct. 8 and 9, broadly supports Hur’s description of Biden in his Feb. 5 report, which was legally mitigating but politically harmful in the context of the crisis. 2024 presidential race, given concerns expressed by voters about the 81-year-old president’s cognitive health.
During the interviews, New York Times Journalist Charlie Savage writes, “Mr. Biden appeared lucid most of the time” — an excellent example of condemnation with vague praise. Voters who think Biden is ‘simply too old to be an effective president’: Nearly three-quarters of them, poll finds Times/ Siena College survey conducted in late February – they probably won’t be reassured by the assessment that is Generally “shiny.” And Savage also highlights parts of the interviews that don’t fit that description.
Some of Biden’s failures to remember are the kind of convenient memory lapses that are common in interviews with criminal suspects and civil defendants. “In attempting to determine whether Mr. Biden had intentionally retained certain classified documents, Mr. Hur repeatedly pressed him for details, such as where and how his staff kept classified documents, who packed his bags when his vice presidency ended, and where particular files had gone,” Selvaggio says. “Mr. Biden, who has denied any wrongdoing, repeatedly demurred, saying he didn’t remember or have any idea how his staff handled such matters, and noting that there was ‘a continuum of many of these people’ helping him in those tasks.”
In particular, Biden claimed ignorance of how sensitive documents related to the war in Afghanistan ended up in “a tattered cardboard box in his garage in Delaware, along with a jumble of unrelated materials”: “‘I can’t remember like a heartbeat- “The box ended up in the garage,” he said, speculating that someone packing must have simply thrown some stuff in. He added that he had “no idea” what was in the tranche of documents sent to his home and “didn’t he didn’t even bother to look into them.'”
Other Biden memory lapses fall into a different category. In several exchanges, he seemed genuinely confused about basic facts like when he was vice president, when his son Beau died and when Trump was elected president.
“Do you have any idea where this material was before it was moved to the garage?” asked Hur. “Well,” Biden responded, “if it was 2013, when would I stop being vice president?” White House Counsel Rachel Cotton helped him: “2017.” Based on this cue, Biden said, “So I was vice president. So it must come from vice president stuff. That’s all I can think of.”
When Biden was asked “how a particular folder… ended up in his garage” in 2017, he “incorrectly invoked the year the documents came from” instead and once again seemed uncertain about the timing of his service as vice president. “My problem was that I never knew exactly where the documents or boxes came from or who packed them,” he said. “I just had them delivered to me. And so this is: At this point, in 2009, am I still vice president?”
Savage claims that Hur “was selective in portraying Mr. Biden’s memory of the ambassadorial position.” At one point, Biden mistakenly recalled that Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, disagreed with him on the merits of a troop surge. But at another point, Savage notes, Biden correctly recalled that he and Eikenberry were on the same side in that internal debate.
In his report, Hur said Biden “did not remember, even after several years, when his son Beau died.” In remarks to the press soon after the report was released, Biden expressed anger at that line. “How the hell dare he bring up something like that?” He said. “Frankly, when I was asked the question I thought it was none of their business.” But the transcript shows that it was Biden who broached the topic.
Hur asked Biden where he kept documents related to various projects, including “your book,” a reference to Promise me, dad, his 2017 memoir about Beau’s death. “This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?” Biden asked. “Yes, sir,” Hur confirmed. Then Biden launched into this uncertain and convoluted response, which seemed to confuse his Senate career with his time as vice president:
Remember, in this time frame, my son was deployed or dying, and so it was – and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time I walked out of the Senate encouraging me to run this period, except the president. They’re not, and that’s not a bad thing to say. He just thought that she [Hillary Clinton] had a better chance of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point, even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t moved away from the idea that I might run for office again. But if I ran again, I would run for president. So what was happening: what month did Beau die? My God, May 30th…
Cotton chimed in again: “2015.” Biden still wasn’t sure of the year: “Was it 2015 that he died?” An “unidentified male speaker” confirmed that “it was May of 2015,” prompting Biden to reiterate that “it was 2015.”
That exchange was immediately followed by confusion about another important date: “And what happened in the meantime is… and Trump gets elected in November of 2017?” An “unidentified male speaker” corrected Biden: “2016.” If so, Biden wondered, “why do I have 2017 here?” As White House counsel Ed Siskel explained, “that’s when you left office, in January 2017.”
Biden then returned to the topic of Beau’s death. “And in 2017, Beau was dead and—this is personal—[that was] the genesis of the book and the title Promise me, dad.” He then told at length the story of how Beau’s dying wish inspired him to stay in politics and later seek the presidency. In other words, the transcript refutes Biden’s later claim that Hur and his staff they had forced him to delve into an important sensitive issue that was “none of their business”.
In addition to providing “context” for the memory lapses cited by Hur, Savage notes “some apparently minor lapses that were not mentioned in Mr. Hur’s report.” For example, Biden “needed to be prodded to remember the name of the federal agency that takes custody of official documents — the National Archives — or that fax machine is the name of the device that transmits images of documents over phone lines.”
Biden said one staffer “focused on taking things on his mind [the University of Delaware] he might want, or that would go to the—what’s his name? You know, the federal government.” His lawyer Robert Bauer knew the answer: “The archives.” Referring to a piece of equipment in a home office, Biden began asking: “What do you call it when they send these…” Siskel it said “Fax” on it.
Again, those “small apparent errors” were Not included in Hur’s report. As for mistakes, he Done That said, many Democrats thought their inclusion was gratuitous. But Hur was obligated to explain why he decided not to prosecute Biden, and that decision hinged on his ability to persuade a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Biden “voluntarily” retained national defense information when he had “reason to believe it.” could be used to the detriment of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Concluding that it probably could not pass that test, Hur anticipated that jurors would be inclined to find Biden’s retention of classified documents accidental.
Biden “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview, as a sympathetic, well-intentioned older man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “Based on our direct interactions with him and our observations, he is a person for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury to convict him – now a former president well into his eighties – of a crime serious that requires a stubborn mental state.”
Contrary to how Democrats described his report on Biden, Hur noted during Tuesday’s hearing, “I didn’t ‘exonerate’ him; that word doesn’t appear in the report.” Rather, Hur concluded that there was ample room for reasonable doubt as to whether Biden had “willfully” violated the law, including his cooperation in identifying and returning the documents after his lawyers found the first set, so such as his generally plausible claims that he had made a mistake. he did not know or could not remember how the material ended up in his possession.
In Trump’s case, by contrast, such excuses can only take him so far. Even if his initial retention of more than 300 classified documents after leaving the White House was unintentional, carelessness does not explain his resistance to returning them, including his alleged defiance of a federal subpoena.
While it is “not our job to evaluate the criminal charges pending against Trump,” Hur said in his report, there are “several substantive distinctions between Trump’s case and Biden’s.” Unlike the “evidence implicating Mr. Biden,” Hur wrote, “the allegations set forth in Mr. Trump’s indictment, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts. In particular, after having had multiple opportunities to return classified documents and avoid the trial, Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to turn over the documents for many months, but also obstructed justice by hiring others to destroy evidence and then lied about it.”