Standout moments from the hearing on the Biden classified documents probe by special counsel Hur

WASHINGTON — It’s a now-familiar ritual in Washington: a federal prosecutor is called to Capitol Hill to discuss the findings of a politically explosive investigation.

Tuesday’s hearing of special counsel Robert Hur, who was investigating President Joe Biden’s handling of classified information, revealed little new legal or political ground. But it generated a lot of talk about the president’s memory — faulty, in Hur’s opinion — about the laws surrounding classified materials and, of course, a lot of talk about Donald Trump.

Here are half a dozen notable moments from Hur’s testimony, the questions surrounding it, and the newly released transcript of Biden’s fall interview with the Enquirer:

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Democrats sought to use Hur’s Republican bona fides to portray him as a political partisan bent on smearing Biden to damage the president’s reelection campaign.

Although Hur concluded that Biden should not face criminal charges, the special counsel also questioned Biden’s age and competency, saying in his report that the president would likely come across to jurors as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, older man with a bad memory’.

In one of the most controversial conversations during the hearing, Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, Hur’s career includes his time as a law clerk for conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and his service as a top official in the United States. Trump’s Justice Department.

Johnson accused Hur of criticizing Biden in an attempt to boost Trump’s campaign. He said Hur knew his characterization of the president’s age and memory “would play into the Republicans’ narrative that the president is unfit for office because he is senile.”

Hur acknowledged that he is a registered Republican, prompting some applause from the crowd. But Hur insisted that politics had nothing to do with his research. And he rejected Johnson’s suggestion that he was trying to get Trump elected because he wants to become a federal judge or return to the Justice Department.

“I can tell you that party politics had no place in my work,” Hur said. “It had no place in the investigative steps I took, it had no place in the decision I made. And it had no place in a single word of my report.”

Trump, the former president and Biden’s expected opponent in this year’s election, was nowhere in the committee room and the prosecutor who investigated him, Jack Smith, was not on the committee’s witness list.

But that didn’t stop Trump from being a central figure at Tuesday’s hearing. Democrats have repeatedly invoked the criminal case accusing the ex-president of illegally hoarding classified documents and refusing to return them as a way to distinguish his behavior from Biden’s.

Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York asked rhetorically why Trump was indicted but Biden was not.

“Not because of some vast conspiracy, not because the so-called ‘deep state’ was out to get him, but because former President Trump was fundamentally incapable of taking advantage of even one of the many, many opportunities he got to avoid it. indictment,” Nadler said.

Both Hur and Smith have gone to great lengths to clarify the factual and legal differences between the two studies.

Biden’s team returned the documents after they were discovered, and the president cooperated with the investigation by voluntarily participating in an interview and agreeing to searches of his homes.

Trump, on the other hand, is accused of knowingly storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, obstructing the FBI’s efforts to recover them, enlisting the help of aides to retrieve the documents for the government to conceal and have incriminating evidence destroyed.

The hearing, like the report, included substantial discussion of the ins and outs of the criminal laws governing the mishandling of classified information.

Republican lawmakers repeatedly seemed baffled that Hur could have advised against prosecution, especially given the haphazard storage of classified documents in a home garage and a recorded conversation in which Biden told his ghostwriter that he had “just found all the classified stuff.” downstairs.”

But Hur repeatedly reminded committee members that the most relevant law at issue in the investigation requires that the unlawful retention of national defense information must be intentional — in other words, done with criminal intent. It’s a high standard that researchers have failed to meet in some other prominent studies, such as the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Hur said in his report that he had found evidence supporting the idea of ​​intentional retention, but repeatedly noted that he had not found enough to prove evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida, said Hur found the elements of a criminal violation but approved the president because Biden was “senile.” Hur objected to this characterization.

“I have to disagree with at least one thing you said, which is that I felt all the elements were met,” Hur said. “One of the elements of the relevant statute for assault is the element of intent. And what my report reflects is my judgment that on the evidence I would not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury that that element of intent was met.”

The release of the transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur and the special counsel’s hours of testimony are unlikely to change preconceptions about the 81-year-old president’s mental stamina and fitness for office.

Biden repeatedly showed vague memory of some dates in his interviews with Hur, including the year of his son’s death and the years of his service as vice president. But he also demonstrated his ability to provide detailed accounts of both important and mundane parts of his life.

Biden gave Hur a “photographic” overview of his home, long speeches about his political life and humorous asides about his sports car.

The interview transcript showed that Hur never asked Biden about the time of his son Beau’s death, as the president had angrily accused him of. But it also suggests that Hur’s conversation with Biden about his son was less revealing about the president’s memory than the special counsel indicated when he cited the episode as an example of the president’s confusion.

Biden, the nation’s oldest president, is seeking another term that, if served, would leave him at age 86.

Biden has a slew of well-worn stories from his life and career that he uses when he speaks publicly. Turns out he also uses them when he talks in private.

The transcript of his interviews with the special counsel shows how Biden revisited some of his most-told stories with the investigators who questioned him.

There’s one about how he decided to run for president after the violence at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. “And then a young woman was murdered, and I talked to her mother,” Biden said. . ‘And then I decided I had to run. I had to be involved because, presumptuously of me, I thought I was the antithesis of everything this man stood for, and that I could beat him.

He later told investigators the story of his trip to Mongolia when he was vice president, where he was presented with a bow and arrow during an invasion demonstration of yesteryear. “Pure luck, I hit the damn target.”

And then there was the story of his son Beau’s death, which brought Biden back into public life and inspired the title of his memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” When Beau Biden was dying of brain cancer, he asked for a minute of his father’s time, Biden recalled.

And then Beau said, according to the president: “’Promise me, Dad. You have to stay involved, I promise.”

Anyone expecting a sober discussion about the intricacies of handling classified documents would have been disappointed. Instead, Democrats and Republicans used the hearing as a means to attack the other party’s presidential candidate.

The strategy was clear from the opening moments. Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, played a long clip from a Biden news conference where he responded to Hur’s report but accidentally referred to the Egyptian leader as “the president of Mexico.”

Nadler responded with a sizzle role of Trump struggling to remember things or mess up names.

Other Democrats also saw an opportunity to raise Trump’s legal issues, beyond those involving classified documents. Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, asked Hur if he had found evidence that Biden paid hush money to a porn actress or former Playboy model. (“No,” Hur replied.)

It is unlikely that either side would have landed a knockout blow, even after hours of testimony. Voters’ views of Trump and Biden are deeply entrenched after years in the public eye.

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AP writer Colleen Long contributed to this report.