The White House wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland the day before special counsel Robert Hur’s report was released, vehemently objecting to aspects of the report – including its “multiple denigrating statements” about the president’s memory.
The letter was the culmination of a months-long attempt by Biden’s team to weigh in on the investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents through letters to Hur and eventually to Hur’s boss, the attorney general. Ultimately, Hur did not appear to heed calls by Biden’s lawyers to produce a narrow and concise report limited to the facts of the charging decision.
Instead, the 388-page report — which declined to bring charges — sparked a political firestorm by making repeated references to Biden’s inability to recall dates and details.
“We object to the multiple denigrating statements about President Biden’s memory which violate longstanding DOJ practice and policy,” Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, and White House counsel, Edward Siskel, wrote in a three-page letter to Garland on February 7. “This report goes further to include allegations that the President has a failing memory in a general sense, an allegation that has no law enforcement purpose.”
The lawyers wrote that “a global and pejorative judgment on the President’s powers of recollection in general is uncalled for and unfounded.”
In the February 7 letter, Biden’s lawyers likened Hur’s efforts in his report to those of James Comey, the FBI director in 2016 who criticized then-candidate Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server, despite not bringing charges. The lawyers wrote Hur’s report “mirrors one of the most widely-recognized examples in recent history of inappropriate prosecutor criticism of uncharged…
Read the full article here