Republicans are likely to pepper Robert K. Hur about his justifications for not charging the president. Democrats will almost certainly slam him for making broad assertions about Mr. Biden’s memory.
Four important queries to pose before Robert Hur’s hearing on Biden’s improper handling of sensitive material
Robert K. Hur, a guy detested by both Democrats and Republicans, will enter a Capitol Hill hearing room on Tuesday as a singularly uniting figure in a divided Washington.
After a year-long inquiry into President Biden’s preservation of classified government records, Mr. Hur, the special counsel looking into the matter, ruled in February that the president should not be charged with a crime.
However, Mr. Hur spoke to the octogenarian president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” likely to be found not guilty by any jury, using language that Mr. Biden’s staff considered unnecessary, politically harmful, and outside the scope of his employment.
When Mr. Hur, 51, appears before the House Judiciary Committee, he will be subjected to a barrage of questions from both sides on his 345-page report that used harsh language and his exoneration of Mr. Biden.
- Mr. Hur intends to resist. The committee will hear Mr. Hur’s testimony that his critical assessment of Mr. Biden was necessary to “show my work” in order to support his decision to drop charges against the president following the discovery of evidence indicating he had purposefully retained secret information. A transcript of Mr. Hur’s opening comments states, “I could not make that determination without assessing the president’s state of mind.”
- Republicans will probably grill him on his contacts with Justice Department officials and his legal defenses for not prosecuting Mr. Biden, even though there is evidence that he was aware that part of the data he had was classified as secret. Democrats will almost definitely try to discredit him for generalizing about Mr. Biden’s recall and attack his credibility in doing so.
- Mr. Hur is not an employee of the Justice Department and will testify as a private citizen. A department official said on Monday that Mr. Hur had quit his position as special counsel and would now be represented by William A. Burck, a private attorney. The spokesman did not provide an explanation for Mr. Hur’s resignation. A request for comment from Mr. Burck, the former deputy counsel in the White House of George W. Bush, was not immediately answered.
- Even though the political stakes are still very high, Tuesday’s hearing will be scrutinized days after Mr. Biden made a forceful case for his presidency in a State of the Union address, which appeared to address some of the issues regarding his age and mental health brought up by the special counsel.
- When testifying in federal court, witnesses frequently misremember details of past occurrences, especially when those events occurred years ago. However, Mr. Hur made mention of Mr. Biden’s memory in non-classified contexts, such as the president’s difficulty recalling the year (2015) that his son Beau passed away.
- Part of the reason for selecting Mr. Hur—a registered Republican who has avoided political politics during his two decades as a prosecutor—was his track record of coolly managing the strain of high-wire investigations and internal department politics.