The former special counsel who investigated Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents has said he is stunned at “the level of vitriol” that greeted him across the US’s political spectrum after he declined to prosecute the president yet portrayed him in a report as an “elderly man with a poor memory”.
“I knew it was going to be unpleasant” taking on the investigation, Robert Hur told The New Yorker in a lengthy interview Friday, more than a week after he appeared at a congressional hearing in which both Democrats and Republicans heavily criticized him. “But the level of vitriol – it’s hard to know exactly how intense that’s going to be until the rotten fruit is being thrown at you.”
Hur’s comments to the publication – his first media interview since his House testimony – largely centered on the Biden report, which he released in February. In it, he concluded that Biden’s handling of classified materials from his time as vice-president to Barack Obama did not warrant criminal charges.
Biden’s Democratic allies subsequently hailed that determination but excoriated Hur for throwing into the report a stinging opinion on the president’s memory, which Republicans seized on in their support of Donald Trump’s efforts to return to the White House in November.
Meanwhile, Republicans who were enthusiastic about Hur’s thoughts on Biden’s memory were simultaneously furious that he had refused to file charges against the president. Their preferred candidate, Donald Trump, on the other hand, faces more than 80 criminal charges for not only his handling of classified materials after his presidency – but also for attempting to subvert his 2020 electoral defeat to Biden and in connection with hush-money payments.
Tensions for Hur hit a fever pitch when he testified in front of a House committee on 12 March. On one side, Democratic congressman Adam Schiff accused Hur of knowing full well that his words would create “a political firestorm” for Biden as he seeks re-election.
And at the opposite end, Republican congressman Matt Gaetz berated Hur for purportedly applying a “double standard” benefiting Biden at Trump’s expense.
Hur maintained to The New Yorker that he had harbored no partisan intentions when he authored his report. He also said that the document’s intended audience was of one: the US attorney general Merrick Garland, a fellow ex-prosecutor.
“I didn’t write it for law students. I didn’t write it for the lay public, and I didn’t write it for Congress,” Hur said of his report, according to The New Yorker. “I wrote it for the attorney general of the United States, who himself was an experienced prosecutor.
“I’m just doing the work. I don’t have a particular ideology or crusade that I’m trying to go after.”
Also in Friday’s interview, Hur addressed his resignation from the justice department on the eve of his congressional testimony. Among those to criticize that move was Harry Litman, a former US attorney turned law professor and legal analyst who contended that Hur could be more free to vilify Biden before Congress if he testified as a “private citizen”.
To that possibility, Hur alluded to a recent precedent set by the former special counsel Robert Mueller. Hur said Mueller stepped down from the justice department upon concluding an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election won by Trump.
“Look, if Mueller did it this way, then there must be some reasons,” Hur remarked. “I don’t want to make history here.”
Hur received his appointment from Garland to investigate Biden’s handling of government secrets in January 2023. At the time, lawyers for Biden reported having found classified government documents at his home and former thinktank.
Garland’s selection of Hur – a former US attorney appointed during Trump’s presidency – was meant to protect the Biden White House from appearances of a conflict of interest or political interference.
Hur said to the New Yorker that he accepted the appointment in part to honor his family history. His mother’s family had fled from North Korea to South Korea shortly before the Korean war.
After his parents arrived in the US in the early 1970s, and shortly before Hur was born, his father embarked on a career as an anesthesiologist. His mother used her nurse’s training to manage her husband’s medical practice, Hur recounted to the New Yorker.
Hur, 51, said he realized he would be living differently if the US had not gotten involved in the Korean war and then accepted his parents, and as a result he believed he had “a real debt to this country”.
“And in my view,” Hur added, “if you’re in a position where the attorney general of the United States says there is a need for someone to do a particularly unpleasant task, if it’s something that you can do, ethically and consistent with your own moral compass, then you should do it.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
