Special counsel Robert Hur will testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday morning about the findings of his investigation of President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents. Expect the hearing to be a clown show in which Republicans try to score political points by relentlessly distracting the public from the essence of Hur’s report.
In his high-profile report which came out in February, Hur, a Trump appointee, said his investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” But he concluded that the evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” and determined that criminal charges weren’t warranted.
In a reasonable world, the hearing would expand upon why Biden’s behavior, while inappropriate, didn’t merit criminal investigations. Hur’s report was critical of Biden, but it concluded that the case against him was weak for a bunch of reasons.
But we don’t live in that world. Instead, we can expect Republicans to hijack the hearing and try to extract as much political fodder as they can from Hur’s comments about one of those reasons: his perceptions of Biden’s “limited” memory. When gaming out how a jury might respond to the case in his report, Hur said he believed it would see Biden sympathetically as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” a departure from the more restrained language prosecutors tend to use. Republicans have capitalized on that phrase and tried to define it as the main takeaway of Hur’s report. And they’re likely to try to leverage Hur’s swipes at Biden’s age to make it sound as if that observation was the primary basis for his assessment, when it wasn’t.
Hur’s report, in fact, discusses at length how the case for criminal charges against Biden had numerous holes. He notes that, as vice president, Biden “had authority to keep classified…
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