In his opening statement, former special counsel Robert Hur defended his descriptions of Joe Biden’s memory and its relevance in his report as “necessary, accurate and fair”.
Hur said:
There has been a lot of attention paid to language in the report about the president’s memory, so let me say a few words about that. My task was to determine whether the president retained or disclosed national defense information “willfully” – meaning, knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids. I could not make that determination without assessing the president’s state of mind.
Hur said that for that reason, he 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”. He added:
My assessment in the report about the relevance of the president’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair. Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe. I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly. I explained to the attorney general my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do.
Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
Robert Hur, the justice department special counsel assigned to report on Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents, told Congress he was just doing his job when he shook up the US election campaign by criticizing the president’s apparent inability to recall certain events. In his opening statement, Hur defended his descriptions of Biden’s memory issues and the relevance of them to his investigation and in his report as “necessary, accurate and fair”.
Appearing before the House judiciary committee, Hur said his investigation into Biden “did not exonerate” the president despite declining to charge him.
Hur declined to rule out accepting a role in a potential second Trump administration. Hur was appointed as a US attorney by Donald Trump in 2017.
A transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden shows the president repeatedly said he never meant to retain classified information after he left the vice-presidency, but he was at times fuzzy about dates and said he was unfamiliar with the paper trail for some of the sensitive documents he handled.
Ken Buck, the hard-right Republican congressman of Colorado, announced he will leave Congress at the end of next week, putting the GOP’s wafer-thin majority in the House in further jeopardy.
The Pentagon will send a new military aid package for Ukraine worth $300m, the White House announced, the first such move in months as fresh funds for weapons have stalled in the House because of Republican opposition.
The White House’s announcement that the US will send a new military aid package for Ukraine worth $300m marks the first such move in months as fresh funds for weapons have stalled in the House because of Republican opposition.
It comes as Ukraine is running dangerously low on munitions, and after months of statements from US officials that the it wouldn’t be able to resume weapons deliveries until Congress provided the additional replenishment funds.
The aid announcement comes as Polish leaders are in Washington to press the US to break its impasse over replenishing funds for Ukraine at a critical moment in the war. The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, met on Tuesday with Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate and was to meet with Joe Biden later in the day.
Donald Trump’s second White House chief of staff tried to stop him from praising Adolf Hitler in part by trying to convince the then president that Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, was “a great guy in comparison”.
“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” the retired marine general John Kelly told Jim Sciutto of CNN in an interview for a new book.
I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.’
Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, was homeland security secretary in the Trump administration before becoming Trump’s second chief of staff. Resigning at the end of 2018, he eventually became a public opponent of his former boss.
Kelly told Sciutto it was “pretty hard to believe” Trump “missed the Holocaust” in his assessment of Hitler, “and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theatre” of the second world war. But I think it’s more … the tough guy thing.”
Trump’s liking for authoritarian leaders, in particular Vladimir Putin of Russia, is well known. His remarks to Kelly about Hitler – like his former practice of keeping a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed – have been reported before.
The Biden campaign is feeling good about Robert Hur’s testimony before the House judiciary committee today, a campaign official has told CNN.
After nearly five hours, the House judiciary committee has adjourned its meeting and former special counsel Robert Hur has been released.
Reaction is coming in to the announcement that Colorado Republican representative Ken Buck is leaving Congress before the end of the month.
One GOP-er called it “alarming”.
Buck announced last November that he wouldn’t stand for re-election but gave no indication then that he would leave before the end of his term. He cited the dysfunction of Congress in general but also slammed the Republican party as it “continues to rely on this lie that the 2020 election was stolen” by Joe Biden from Donald Trump.
Buck is currently questioning Robert Hur in the judiciary committee hearing.
The House judiciary committee hearing has resumed in the questioning of now-former special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Joe Biden’s having kept hold of classified documents after he left office as the US vice-president.
Hur concluded that the US president should not be punished, which enraged Republicans, but justified that decision by saying, essentially, that a jury would find Biden too forgetful, because of his age, to be able to conclude that he committed a crime.
“I stand by every word in the document,” Hur said in testimony at the hearing.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the fresh consignment of $300m of weapons that the US is dispatching to Ukraine won’t last long.
The weaponry including artillery ammunition will “maybe only last for a couple of weeks”, Sullivan said during a media briefing at the White House.
Meanwhile, the outgoing Senate minority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, has just urged the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, to hold a vote in the lower chamber on the stalled bill that supplies new aid to US allies Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, Reuters reports.
The US Senate gave final approval to a $95bn wartime aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other American allies, including Taiwan, last month and sent the bill to the Republican-controlled House, where it screeched to a halt amid rightwing opposition.
Sullivan has left the west wing briefing room now and White House the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, is answering questions that focus more on US domestic topics.
The Pentagon will rush about $300m in weapons to Ukraine after finding some cost savings in its contracts, the Associated Press reports.
The relatively small input will happen even though the US military remains deeply overdrawn and needs at least $10bn to replenish all the weapons it has pulled from its stocks to help Kyiv in its desperate fight against Russia, the White House announced a little earlier.
It’s the Pentagon’s first announced security package for Ukraine since December, when it acknowledged it was out of replenishment funds. It wasn’t until recent days that officials publicly acknowledged they weren’t just out of replenishment funds, but overdrawn.
The announcement comes as Ukraine is running dangerously low on munitions and efforts to get fresh funds for weapons have stalled in the House because of Republican opposition. US officials have insisted for months that the United States wouldn’t be able to resume weapons deliveries until Congress provided additional replenishment funds, which are part of a large supplemental package stalled in Congress.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan, in announcing the $300m in additional aid:
When Russian troops advance and its guns fire, Ukraine does not have enough ammunition to fire back.
The aid announcement comes as Polish leaders are in Washington to press the US to break its impasse over replenishing funds for Ukraine at a critical moment in the war. Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, met on Tuesday with Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate and was to meet with Joe Biden later in the day.
The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, has so far refused to bring the $95bn package, which includes aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, to the floor.
Republican congressman Ken Buck of Colorado is leaving Congress short of his elected term, he announced within the last half hour.
Buck is a hard-right representative. He had already announced that he would not seek re-election but now he’s leaving much sooner, putting the GOP’s wafer-thin majority in the House in further jeopardy.
Here’s the congressman’s post on X/Twitter:
The congressional hearing for former special counsel Robert Hur to be questioned about his report into Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents after leaving the vice-presidency has taken a recess for lunch. There are some unrelated votes to be taken in the House and the hearing will resume after those this afternoon but without an exact time given.
Here’s where things stand:
National security adviser Jake Sullivan is now briefing the media in the west wing, and will be followed by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. We’ll bring you highlights.
Robert Hur declined to engage in Republicans’ questions at the hearing in front of the House judiciary committee about whether Joe Biden is “senile”. Asked whether he found that Biden was senile, after interviewing the US president at length about how he hung on to classified documents after his vice-presidency, Hur said: “I did not. That conclusion does not appear in my report.”
Hur said he “did not exonerate” Biden in his report. Hur interrupted Pramila Jayapal, the Democrat congresswoman from Washington, when she said Hur’s report amounted to a “complete exoneration” of the president. Hur shot back: “I did not exonerate him. That word does not appear in my report.”
Hur declined to rule out accepting a role in a potential second Trump administration. Hur was appointed as a US attorney by Donald Trump in 2017. Trump is running for re-election to a second term as a Republican president.
In his opening statement, Hur defended his descriptions of Joe Biden’s memory issues and the relevance of them to his investigation and in his report as “necessary, accurate and fair”.
Hur is testifying before the House judiciary committee as a private citizen after leaving the justice department. According to a report by the Independent, Hur arranged his departure from the justice department to be official as of Monday, 11 March.
Jerry Nadler, the Democrat House judiciary committee ranking member, began his opening statement at the hearing by saying that House Republicans are “desperate to convince America that white conservative men are on the losing end of a two-tiered justice system, a theory … that has no basis in reality”. Nadler opined that Biden “probably committed a verbal slip or two” in his interviews with Hur.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
