Robert Hur’s damning testimony about Joe Biden

“We identified evidence that President Biden willfully retained classified materials after the end of his vice presidency, when he was a private citizen,” former special counsel Robert Hur testified Tuesday to the House Judiciary Committee, confirming the contents of a report he released last month.

Hur also testified that his report did not “exonerate” Biden, contrary to statements from Democrats on the committee.

Hur was professional and prepared and only testified to the facts contained in his report; he would not engage in hypotheticals and would not speculate or opine on cases he was not involved in.

Hur’s report was a flashpoint for Biden, as Hur said he would not recommend criminal charges in the classified documents matter because Biden would likely present to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur also wrote that Biden had “apparent lapses and failures” in 2017 interviews with his ghostwriter that were consistent with the “diminished faculties” evident in his interview with the Department of Justice. The report was a brutal assessment of Biden’s mental acuity and was followed up by an angry presser in which Biden attempted to defend himself but only raised further questions about his memory. In that press conference, he forgot where his son’s rosary came from and mixed up the leaders of Mexico and Egypt when discussing the war in Gaza.

There were only two logical responses the White House could have to the report. One, that Hur was right to not charge Biden, which would be an admission that Biden indeed has diminished mental capacity. Two, that Biden does not have memory issues, which would nullify Hur’s assessment that a jury wouldn’t convict and could open the door to prosecution.

The White House chose a third route, which required them to misrepresent the contents of the report. In a letter to the media, White House spokesman Ian Sams accused them of getting it “wrong” when they reported that Biden has willfully retained classified documents.

“The Special Counsel report was ~400 pages long, meandering and confusing. That led to a lot of misreporting on its conclusions, namely that it found POTUS ‘willfully retained’ classified docs. That’s wrong,” Sams wrote in his letter to reporters.

When pressed several times on this point during Tuesday’s testimony, Hur repeatedly doubled down on his report’s conclusions. He stood by his assessment of Biden’s memory problems, confirmed that the evidence points to willful retention and rejected attempts by Democrats to say that the report cleared or exonerated the president. His conclusion, Hur testified, was based on whether or not he thought a conviction was likely; not on whether or not Biden committed the crime.

Hur confirmed that the White House also made several direct appeals to the DoJ in an effort to get Hur to change or remove references to Biden’s mental state from the report.

In one notable moment, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal asserted that Hur’s “lengthy, expensive and independent investigation resulted in a completed exoneration of President Joe Biden. For every document you discussed in your report, you found insufficient evidence that the president violated any laws about possession or retention of classified materials.” 

“I need to go back and take note of the word you used: ‘exoneration.’ That is not a word I used in the report,” Hur retorted, prompting Jayapal to begin speaking over the special counsel and insist she finish her line questioning. Hur nonetheless continued over her objections, “That’s not part of my task as a prosecutor. The judgment that I ultimately reached is whether sufficient evidence existed such that the likely outcome would be a conviction.” 

“You exonerated him,” Jayapal repeated.

“I did not exonerate him,” Hur asserted.

Hur also refused to answer in the affirmative when Ranking Member Jerry Nadler asked if he found that there was not enough evidence to charge Biden with a crime.

Other Democrats, such as Representative Ted Lieu, opted to not directly defend Biden. Instead, they compared Biden’s conduct as lined out in Hur’s report to that of former president Donald Trump in the classified documents case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith and his other indictments. Representative Eric Swalwell opened his line of questioning by suggesting the former president would have prohibited Hur’s parents from immigrating to the United States and later incorrectly referred to Trump as a “rapist.” (A jury in a defamation trial determined it was “more likely than not” — a lower standard than in a criminal trial — that Trump sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll. They did not find him culpable for rape). Representative Cori Bush used her time to call Trump the “former white supremacist-in-chief.”

Republicans mostly dug into specific claims about Biden’s conduct made in the report, such as Biden’s admission during conversations with his ghostwriter that he might be showing him classified material. Earlier the president had claimed, “I did not share classified information… I did not share it with my ghostwriter.” Hur also noted that Biden’s ghostwriter deleted relevant audio files shortly after a special counsel was appointed to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents.

Hur said, “He slid those files into his recycle bin on his computer.”

“Tried to destroy the evidence didn’t he?” Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan clarified.

“Correct,” Hur said.

Some members of the GOP spoke highly of Hur but openly disagreed with his assessment that Biden’s memory issues and his unlikeliness to reoffend are legitimate reasons not to pursue prosecution.

Adding further fireworks to Hur’s day of testimony, the Department of Justice opted to release the transcript of Biden’s interview with the DoJ that took place on October 8, 2023. The transcript revealed further lies from Biden and the White House and shed greater insight into Hur’s determination of Biden’s mental incapacities. For example, Biden had previously accused Hur of being the one to bring up the death of his son, Beau Biden.

”How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden said during the presser responding to the report. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”

But the transcript shows that Hur only asked Biden about documents he kept at his home in Virginia. Biden replied by identifying the time period he was at that home as “2017, 2018, that area,” and then bringing up Beau’s death.

“Remember, in this timeframe, my son is — either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was — and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period … I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again,” Biden told Hur. “And, and so what was happening, though – what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30… ” 

A staffer interjected that Beau had died in 2015, contrary to Biden’s claim that he might have still been serving in the military or actively dying from brain cancer in 2017 or 2018. Biden then gets confused about the year that Trump was elected president.

“Was it 2015 he died?” Biden asked. “And that’s happened in the meantime is that as — and Trump gets elected in November of 2017?” 

Biden similarly gets derailed in other parts of the interview, including in one section where he begins a long discussion about cars and makes “car sounds” multiple times.

“By the way, you know how it works? It’s really cool,” Biden says.

“Sir, I’d love— I would love to hear much more about this, but I do have a few more questions to get through,” Hur responds.

“You step your foot on the accelerator all the way down until it gets about six, seven grand. Then all the sudden it will say, ‘launch’. All you do is take your foot off the brake (Makes car sound),”  Biden continues, according to the transcript.

Elsewhere, Biden joked with prosecutors that they may have found “risqué” photos of his wife, First Lady Jill Biden, in a bathing suit at his home in Wilmington before promptly forgetting what a fax machine is called.

Hur’s testimony Tuesday combined with the release of the interview transcript served as a brutal one-two punch to the Biden White House and campaign team. Hur used his testimony to stand by the fundamental findings of his investigation and directly tackle the Biden team’s dismissive spin, while the transcript allowed Americans to see for themselves why Hur was concerned enough about the president’s mental state to recommend foregoing prosecution.