Legal analysts blast Special Counsel Robert Hur's report on Joe Biden as a "partisan hit job," raising questions about the need for a criminal investigation

Joe Biden and Robert Hur

 

Special Counsel Robert Hur's report on President Joe Biden was a "partisan hit job," according to a report at The New Republic (TNR) That raises this question: Did someone put Hur up to the hit job, and do Hur and his associates need to be the target of a criminal investigation, especially when you consider that Hur happens to be a Donald Trump appointee? TNR's Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling writes under the headline "'Partisan hit job: Legal Experts Slam Special Counsel’s Biden Report; The special counsel’s Biden report is “entirely inappropriate":

Legal analysts blasted special counsel Robert Hur’s report on President Joe Biden, deriding the Department of Justice investigation as a “partisan hit job.”

“Special Counsel Hur's report on Biden's classified-documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with longstanding DOJ traditions,” former Attorney General Eric Holder said in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review, these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised.”

 

Andew Weissman, former lead prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, called the report “entirely inappropriate.”

“It is also exactly what you’re not supposed to do, which is putting your thumb on the scale that could have political repercussions,” said Weissman. “You either decide to go forward, that there is proof here, or you don’t say anything at all with respect to your opinions about the case.”

A top Biden campaign official described Hur’s report as a “Comey moment,” while former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer dubbed the report a “partisan hit job.”

And Vice President Kamala Harris offered her own aggressive defense of the president, calling for the special counsel to have a “higher level of integrity” after the report accused the 81-year-old president of having a memory with “significant limitations.”

“What I saw in that report last night, I believe, is—as a former prosecutor—the comments that were made by that prosecutor [are] gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate,” Harris told reporters.

“On October 7, Israel experienced a horrific attack, and I will tell you we got the calls, the president and myself, in the hours after that occurred,” Harris continued. “It was an intense moment for the commander in chief of the United States of America, and I was in almost every meeting with the president in the hours and days that followed.”

“The president was in front of and on top of it all,” she added.

“So, the way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized, could not be more wrong on the facts, and [is] clearly politically motivated.”

The report, which claimed Biden struggled to remember basic details like what year his vice presidency under Obama ended and what year his son Beau died, during an interview just days after October 7, challenged the president on an already crumbling front. Polling indicates that three-quarters of Americans think that Biden is too old for a second term.

CNN's Evan Perez notes that special counsel reports often generate controversy, and he explains why that tends to happen. 

The Hamas attack on Israel's plays a role in the Biden-Hur story, reports TNR, noting that Biden provided the special-counsel interview while also trying to wrestle with fallout from the Hamas attack: 

A letter from Biden’s legal team, included in the report, simultaneously applauds the decision not to charge Biden while condemning the report as an inaccurate assessment of Biden’s mental clarity, citing the questionable timing of Hur’s interviews.

“We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate. The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events,” the attorneys wrote.

“In fact there is ample evidence from your interview that the President did well in answering your questions about years-old events over the course of hours. This is especially true under the circumstances, which you do not mention in your report … that his interview began the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel,” they added.

In his own statement, the president reaffirmed that narrative, claiming his eagerness to satisfy the needs of the investigation came at the expense of multihour interviews in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel.

“I was so determined to give the Special Counsel what they needed that I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on October 8th and 9th of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7th and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis,” Biden said.