President Joe Biden’s aides are attacking special counsel Robert Hur for supposedly being a “MAGA” Republican, despite his legal career and political activity showing otherwise.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) released Hur’s concluding report on his investigation into Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents when he was a private citizen. Although President Biden will not face criminal charges, Hur’s observations about Biden’s advanced age and memory lapses during interviews brought renewed scrutiny upon the president’s mental faculties. (RELATED: Joe Biden Kept Classified Ukraine Information From Time Period When Hunter Biden Sat On Burisma’s Board)
READ THE REPORT:
The president’s allies have begun portraying Hur as a “MAGA guy” Republican prosecutor responsible for producing a partisan, editorialized report, according to Politico.
Hur was appointed Maryland U.S. Attorney by former President Donald Trump with support from the state’s two Democratic Sens. Cardin and Van Hollen. He held the position from April 2018 to February 2021 and returned to private practice at prominent law firm Gibson Dunn upon his resignation.
His political history consists of donations to a handful of Republican candidates, such as former Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a noted opponent of Trump before his death, according to state and federal donation data compiled by campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets.
He also donated to anti-Trump former Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and former Republican Vermont senate candidate Christina Nolan, a former U.S. Attorney for the state. Hogan endorsed former Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the GOP primary.
Nolan, a gay woman, support LGBT rights and considers herself and environmentalist, she told the Vermont digger in a February 2022 interview. She refused to say whether she voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election during a GOP primary debate, the outlet later reported.
A Stanford Law School graduate, Hur clerked for Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alan Kozinsky and then-Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, according to his Maryland Board of Regents bio and Gibson Dunn’s announcement of Hur’s arrival. He held multiple positions at the DOJ including Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General from 2017-18.
President Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur special counsel in January 2023 to carry out the classified documents investigation.
“I am confident that Mr. Hur will carry out his responsibility in an even-handed and urgent manner, and in accordance with the highest traditions of this Department,” Garland said when he announced Hur’s appointment.
Hur’s report specifically described how Biden was unable to recall when he served as vice president and the year his late son Beau passed away. President Biden came off as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur’s report observes.
In addition, Hur asserted that President Biden willfully retained classified documents related to foreign policy and national security, but declined to pursue criminal charges against the sitting president.
“We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” Hur began the report.
“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. These materials included (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” he added.
In response to Hur’s report, President Biden held an angry press conference Thursday night to defend his mental capacity and blamed the retention of classified documents on his staffers. The president pushed back against Hur’s findings related to his memory and the specific anecdote about forgetting the year his son died.
At the press conference, Joe Biden mixed up Mexico and Egypt’s presidents, and forgot the name of the parish where he received a rosary to commemorate Beau Biden’s death.