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Tag: robert hur

  • House Republicans move forward with holding AG Merrick Garland in contempt

    House Republicans move forward with holding AG Merrick Garland in contempt

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    House Republicans will take their first step towards holding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress on Thursday for refusing to turn over the audio recordings of special counsel Robert Hur’s interviews with President Joe Biden.Video above: Special Counsel Robert Hur testifies before House committee about his report on Biden’s handling of classified documentsThe House Oversight and Judiciary committees will each hold markups on their respective reports recommending a contempt of Congress resolution against Garland for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena. If passed out of the committees, the resolutions would next go to the House floor for a vote by the whole chamber. It is not clear when that vote would be held.Shortly after Hur closed his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents in February, Republicans subpoenaed the Department of Justice for a number of documents and information, including the audio recordings of the special counsel’s interviews with Biden and his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer.While Hur’s probe led to no charges against the president, Republicans have seized on Hur’s description of Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in his final report.CNN has sued for access to recordings of federal investigators’ interview with Biden in the now-closed probe over his handling of classified documents.Through their subpoenas to DOJ, House Republicans have argued that the audio recordings are crucial to their impeachment inquiry into Biden, which remains stalled as the prospects of the investigation ending in impeachment are increasingly unlikely. Without the votes in their narrow majority or evidence of an impeachable offense, Republicans are now struggling with how to end their probe and are looking for ways to target other members of the Biden administration.Video below: Special counsel report says Biden willfully retained classified infoThe Department has made the majority of the subpoenaed materials available to House Republicans, including transcripts of the special counsel’s interviews with Biden and his ghostwriter, but it has doubled down on its decision to not release the audio files of the interviews, stating that Republicans have not established a legitimate legislative purpose for demanding these recordings.In their contempt reports, Republicans stated that DOJ does not get to determine what information is useful to their investigation, and argued that the verbal nuances of an audio recording provide unique insight into a subject that are not reflected in a transcript.“The Constitution does not permit the executive branch to dictate to Congress how to proceed with an impeachment inquiry or to conduct its oversight,” the report reads.In a recent letter to the Republican-led committees, DOJ Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte wrote to the House Oversight and Judiciary panels that Republicans do not need the audio recordings since DOJ turned over the transcripts, which would address Republican allegations made about the president as part of their impeachment inquiry.“It seems that the more information you receive, the less satisfied you are, and the less justification you have for contempt, the more you rush towards it,” Uriarte wrote.DOJ has also outlined distinct privacy concerns related to an audio recording of an interview compared to a written transcript, and how the release of such an audio file could dissuade cooperation from future witnesses in criminal investigations.Raising concerns that Republicans want these audio files for political purposes, he added: “the Committees’ inability to identify a need for these audio files grounded in legislative or impeachment purposes raises concerns about what other purposes they might serve.”Republicans, meanwhile, argue in their report that while the transcripts of the interviews reflect what was said, “they do not reflect important verbal context, such as tone or tenor, or nonverbal context, such as pauses or pace of delivery.”Such pauses and inflections, Republicans claim, “can provide indications of a witness’s ability to recall events, or whether the individual is intentionally giving evasive or nonresponsive testimony to investigators.”Republicans pointed to a recent example of when a transcript and audio recording of the president diverged, stating that at a speech last month, Biden read a teleprompter cue out loud during his speech, which was reflected in the recording of the event but not in the initial transcript of his remarks.The House Oversight Committee pushed back the start time of its Thursday markup so that Republican committee members can attend the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump in New York City, two sources familiar with the planning told CNN.When asked to comment on the reason for the schedule change, an Oversight Committee spokeswoman told CNN, “Due to member schedule conflicts, the markup is now starting at a different time to accommodate members’ schedules.”

    WASHINGTON —

    House Republicans will take their first step towards holding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress on Thursday for refusing to turn over the audio recordings of special counsel Robert Hur’s interviews with President Joe Biden.

    Video above: Special Counsel Robert Hur testifies before House committee about his report on Biden’s handling of classified documents

    The House Oversight and Judiciary committees will each hold markups on their respective reports recommending a contempt of Congress resolution against Garland for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena. If passed out of the committees, the resolutions would next go to the House floor for a vote by the whole chamber. It is not clear when that vote would be held.

    Shortly after Hur closed his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents in February, Republicans subpoenaed the Department of Justice for a number of documents and information, including the audio recordings of the special counsel’s interviews with Biden and his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer.

    While Hur’s probe led to no charges against the president, Republicans have seized on Hur’s description of Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in his final report.

    CNN has sued for access to recordings of federal investigators’ interview with Biden in the now-closed probe over his handling of classified documents.

    Through their subpoenas to DOJ, House Republicans have argued that the audio recordings are crucial to their impeachment inquiry into Biden, which remains stalled as the prospects of the investigation ending in impeachment are increasingly unlikely. Without the votes in their narrow majority or evidence of an impeachable offense, Republicans are now struggling with how to end their probe and are looking for ways to target other members of the Biden administration.

    Video below: Special counsel report says Biden willfully retained classified info

    The Department has made the majority of the subpoenaed materials available to House Republicans, including transcripts of the special counsel’s interviews with Biden and his ghostwriter, but it has doubled down on its decision to not release the audio files of the interviews, stating that Republicans have not established a legitimate legislative purpose for demanding these recordings.

    In their contempt reports, Republicans stated that DOJ does not get to determine what information is useful to their investigation, and argued that the verbal nuances of an audio recording provide unique insight into a subject that are not reflected in a transcript.

    “The Constitution does not permit the executive branch to dictate to Congress how to proceed with an impeachment inquiry or to conduct its oversight,” the report reads.

    In a recent letter to the Republican-led committees, DOJ Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte wrote to the House Oversight and Judiciary panels that Republicans do not need the audio recordings since DOJ turned over the transcripts, which would address Republican allegations made about the president as part of their impeachment inquiry.

    “It seems that the more information you receive, the less satisfied you are, and the less justification you have for contempt, the more you rush towards it,” Uriarte wrote.

    DOJ has also outlined distinct privacy concerns related to an audio recording of an interview compared to a written transcript, and how the release of such an audio file could dissuade cooperation from future witnesses in criminal investigations.

    Raising concerns that Republicans want these audio files for political purposes, he added: “the Committees’ inability to identify a need for these audio files grounded in legislative or impeachment purposes raises concerns about what other purposes they might serve.”

    Republicans, meanwhile, argue in their report that while the transcripts of the interviews reflect what was said, “they do not reflect important verbal context, such as tone or tenor, or nonverbal context, such as pauses or pace of delivery.”

    Such pauses and inflections, Republicans claim, “can provide indications of a witness’s ability to recall events, or whether the individual is intentionally giving evasive or nonresponsive testimony to investigators.”

    Republicans pointed to a recent example of when a transcript and audio recording of the president diverged, stating that at a speech last month, Biden read a teleprompter cue out loud during his speech, which was reflected in the recording of the event but not in the initial transcript of his remarks.

    The House Oversight Committee pushed back the start time of its Thursday markup so that Republican committee members can attend the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump in New York City, two sources familiar with the planning told CNN.

    When asked to comment on the reason for the schedule change, an Oversight Committee spokeswoman told CNN, “Due to member schedule conflicts, the markup is now starting at a different time to accommodate members’ schedules.”

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  • The Failure of DOJ’s Special Counsel System

    The Failure of DOJ’s Special Counsel System

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    Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

    Quick show of hands: Who’s satisfied with the work done by our past five special counsels: Robert Mueller, John Durham, David Weiss, Jack Smith, and Robert Hur?

    Anyone?

    We’ve now got a meaningful sample size, and the conclusion is clear: It’s time to scrap the Justice Department’s special counsel regime. It looks fine on paper but, as we’ve seen repeatedly over the past decade, it just doesn’t work in practice. It’s not necessarily the fault of the appointed prosecutors, though their work has been uneven and flawed at times. The problem is the system itself.

    The modern special counsel regulations came about as a political half-measure of sorts. After Watergate, Congress passed the Independent Counsel Act, which empowered the attorney general (with permission from a panel of federal judges) to appoint an outsider to investigate and prosecute powerful political figures, to minimize potential conflicts of interest. It made sense in theory — until reality intruded in the personage of one Kenneth Winston Starr. The infamous independent counsel began by probing a convoluted Arkansas land deal tangentially involving the Clintons, and he wound up writing soft-core porn featuring cigars and poetry books and pillow talk, plunging the country into a salacious, unnecessary impeachment.

    Congress, scarred by the Starr experience, declined to re-up the independent counsel law, letting it expire  with a legislative sunset in 1999. In its place arose a new set of non-statutory federal regulations empowering the AG to appoint a “special counsel” in cases presenting conflicts of interest or “other extraordinary circumstances.” The special counsel exercises the powers of a federal prosecutor, but without “day-to-day supervision” by the attorney general. At the end of an investigation, the special counsel must write a report “explaining the prosecution or declination decisions.” That report goes to the AG and then, typically, to Congress and the public.

    Since the dawn of the Trump era, special counsels have delivered suboptimal results and sometimes worse than that, both prosecutorially and politically. Let’s take a quick spin through recent history.

    Robert Mueller, hyped as the steely-eyed savior of democracy, conducted a revelatory investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election but then spit the bit at the moment of truth. Rather than stating clearly whether Donald Trump had committed an obstruction crime, Mueller gave us mush-mouth, bureaucratic double-talk: I can’t indict the sitting president, and I would say so if I could clear him, but I’m not necessarily saying that, but I’m also not NOT saying that, essentially. Attorney General Bill Barr eagerly stepped into the void and spun Mueller’s investigation right out of existence. Mueller left us with a dense tome of a report about Trump’s abuses and zero consequences.

    After Mueller, we were treated to John Durham. You remember the scowling, goateed menace who would make Trump world’s “investigate the investigators” vengeance fantasies come true. Turns out: not so much. Instead, Durham delivered one piddly guilty plea resulting in probation, two humiliating trials ending with not-guilty verdicts, and a pile of superfluous, regurgitated talking points about how Trump got set up by the deep state.

    The Biden administration has given us three special counsels. Shortly after the Hunter Biden plea deal fell apart at the last moment in July 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed David Weiss — who already was running the case anyway — as special counsel. That fixed precisely nothing. Now we’ve got two pending Hunter Biden indictments of undetermined merit, and distrust on both sides of the political aisle.

    Garland also tapped Robert Hur as special counsel to investigate President Biden’s retention of classified documents. Hur’s final report recommended no criminal charges but revealed that Biden knew he had sensitive classified documents at his home in 2017 and failed to return them to the government — contrary to repeated public assurances by Biden and his handlers that his possession of classified information was unintentional. (Biden is on tape in 2017, shortly after he left the vice-presidency, telling a ghostwriter that he “just found all the classified stuff downstairs” — referring to materials on U.S. war policy in Afghanistan.) For all the substance in Hur’s report, it made headlines primarily for its excessively colorful descriptions of Biden’s age and spotty memory.

    And then there’s Jack Smith. It’s too early to make a final evaluation, but it seems increasingly likely that he will fail in his quest to try one or both of his Trump indictments before the November 2024 election. In the process, Smith has flouted DOJ policy and principle by straining to try Trump before the election (while dishonestly refusing to acknowledge the obvious reality that he’s doing just that).

    Much of the controversy around any special counsel is unavoidable. By definition, a special counsel exists only at the most fraught intersection of prosecution and politics, and getting rid of the regulations won’t make those tough cases magically disappear. But the Justice Department can do better here.

    Recent history has exposed two overarching problems. First, anytime an AG appoints a prosecutor specifically to probe one particular person, there’s a natural tendency to go overboard. Starr is the poster child here, as he spent five years desperately pursuing the Clintons, all to uncover a handful of lies about a sexual affair. To lesser extents, Durham and Mueller strained to score political points apart from actual criminal violations, and there are legitimate questions about whether Weiss and Smith have bent normal practice in pursuit of their prey. I’ll cop to being less than a saint here myself; I took a similar approach when I was gunning to take down mob bosses by any means available. But it’s not the prosecutorial ideal. We’re supposed to start with the crime and pursue the perpetrator, not vice versa.

    Second, the report-writing requirement has done more harm than good. It’s an ironclad prosecutorial canon that we do our talking in court; we don’t fling accusatory extrajudicial rhetoric against a person who hasn’t been indicted. Yet the special counsel regulations require prosecutors to do just that. Mueller, Durham, and Hur wrote hundreds of pages containing damning information about people who were never charged. It’s nice to have transparency in these high-profile cases — as a member of the media, I welcome it — but the DOJ doesn’t exist to write novellas, especially about people who don’t face charges.

    The special counsel regulations, in sum, enhance neither performance nor perception. So here’s my proposal: We don’t need a special set of rules for potentially sensitive political matters. The DOJ should just treat those cases like any other. Personnel and expertise won’t be a problem. The AG can tap any of the DOJ’s 10,000 or so federal prosecutors to handle any given case, and he can dedicate as many resources as necessary to get the job done efficiently. Nor does a “special counsel” label enhance the DOJ’s investigative and prosecutorial efficacy. Both Durham and Weiss went from “regular prosecutor running the case” to “special counsel” midstream during their investigations. The new titles changed little and fixed nothing.

    At most, a special counsel gains a bit more formal independence from the AG than a federal prosecutor ordinarily might have. But is that necessarily a good thing? Don’t we want the attorney general — the person who’s supposed to be directly accountable to Congress, the administration, and the public — to have the final say and primary responsibility? If there’s a conflict of interest involving the AG, she can recuse and the deputy AG can handle it. This happens all the time, and it works just fine. And the “special counsel” designation does little to enhance public trust in the DOJ. Did anyone feel better about the Durham or Weiss cases after their changes in title? Were any Smith or Hur skeptics won over by their status as “special counsel”?

    Appointment of special counsel has become an all-purpose cop-out, a counterproductive crutch for AGs of both parties and for the DOJ itself. The evidence is now clear: The modern special counsel regime has become untenable. It’s time to move on.

    Listen to this article. For more analysis of law and politics with Elie Honig, Preet Bharara, and other contributors, sign up for the free CAFE newsletter or become a member of CAFE Insider.

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    Elie Honig

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  • How Hur Misled the Country on Biden’s Memory

    How Hur Misled the Country on Biden’s Memory

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    First impressions stick. After a big story hits, the initial conclusions can turn out to be wrong, or partly wrong, but the revisions are not what people remember. They remember the headlines in imposing font, the solemn tone from a presenter, the avalanche of ironic summaries on social media. Political operatives know this, and it’s that indelible impression they want, one that sticks like a greasy fingerprint and that no number of follow-ups or awkward corrections could possibly wipe away.

    Five years ago, a partisan political operative with the credibility of a long career in government service misled the public about official documents in order to get Donald Trump the positive spin he wanted in the press. The play worked so well that a special counsel appointed to examine President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, Robert Hur, ran it again.

    In 2019, then–Attorney General Bill Barr—who would later resign amid Trump’s attempts to suborn the Justice Department into backing his effort to seize power after losing reelection—announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to indict Trump on allegations that he had assisted in a Russian effort to sway the 2016 election and had obstructed an investigation into that effort. Mueller’s investigation led to indictments of several Trump associates, but he later testified that Justice Department policy barred prosecuting a sitting president, and so indicting Trump was not an option. Barr’s summary—which suggested that Trump had been absolved of any crimes—was so misleading that it drew a rebuke not only from Mueller himself but from a federal judge in a public-records lawsuit over material related to the investigation. That judge, Reggie Walton, wrote in 2020 that the discrepancies “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary.”

    David A. Graham: The Special Counsel’s devastating description of Biden

    As my colleague David Graham wrote at the time, the ploy worked. Trump claimed “total exoneration,” and mainstream outlets blared his innocence in towering headlines. Only later did the public learn that Mueller’s report had found “no criminal conspiracy but considerable links between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, and strongly suggested that Trump had obstructed justice.”

    Now this same pattern has emerged once again, only instead of working in the president’s favor, it has undermined him. Hur, a former U.S. attorney in the Trump administration, was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden for potential criminal wrongdoing after classified documents were found at his home. (Trump has been indicted on charges that he deliberately mishandled classified documents after storing such documents at his home in Florida and deliberately showing them off to visitors as “highly confidential” and “secret information.”)

    In Hur’s own summary of his investigation, he concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” even absent DOJ policy barring prosecution of a sitting president. But that part was not what caught the media’s attention. Rather it was Hur’s characterization of Biden as having memory problems, validating conservative attacks on the president as too old to do the job. The transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden, released yesterday by House Democrats, suggest that characterization—politically convenient for Republicans and the Trump campaign—was misleading.

    Sparking alarming headlines about Biden’s mental faculties, Hur had written that Biden “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.” As with Barr’s, that conclusion set off a media frenzy in which many mainstream outlets strongly reinforced conservative propaganda that Biden was mentally unfit to serve, a narrative that reverberated until the president’s animated delivery of the State of the Union address last week.

    In press coverage following the report, Hur’s phrase was frequently shortened to an “elderly man with a poor memory,” turning the evaluation of a potential legal strategy into something akin to a medical diagnosis. A cacophony of mainstream-media coverage questioning Biden’s age and fitness followed, while conservative politicians and media figures outright declared Biden incapacitated and demanded he be removed from office according to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which provides for succession in case a president is “unable to discharge his duties.”

    The transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden illuminate Hur’s summary as uncharitable at best. As a report in The Washington Post noted, “Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.”

    Hur wrote that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” Yet the transcript shows Biden remembering the exact day, May 30, after which staffers offer the year—2015—and Biden says, “Was it 2015 he had died?” In another exchange Hur singled out as indicative of Biden’s poor memory, he said Biden mischaracterized the point of view of an Obama-administration official who had opposed a surge of combat troops to the war in Afghanistan, but left out that Biden correctly stated the official’s views in an exchange later that day. The transcript also shows Biden struggling with other dates while answering questions about when he obtained certain documents or in the interval between the Obama and Biden administrations, when he decided to run for president. But as The New York Times reported, “In both instances, Mr. Biden said the wrong year but appeared to recognize that he had misspoken and immediately stopped to seek clarity and orient himself.”

    The transcript does not completely refute Hur’s description of Biden’s memory, but it is entirely incompatible with the conservative refrain that Biden has “age-related dementia.” Indeed, both Barr and Hur framed their conclusions with a telltale lawyerly touch that would push the media and the public toward a far broader conclusion about Trump’s supposed innocence or Biden’s alleged decline while allowing them to deny that they had been so explicit.

    There’s no question that both Biden and Trump are much older than they used to be. To watch clips of either of them from 20 years ago is to recognize a significant difference. But the transcript shows Biden exactly as he appeared in the State of the Union last week, as someone who has lost a step or two as he’s aged but is fully capable of grasping the politics and policy implications demanded by the presidency. “Mr. Biden went into great detail about many matters, the transcript shows,” the Times reported. “He made jokes over the two days, teasing the prosecutors. And at certain points, he corrected his interrogators when they were the ones who misspoke.” During an exchange about Biden’s home, Hur remarked that Biden had a “photographic understanding and recall of the house,” a remark Hur acknowledged in yesterday’s testimony before the House that he had left out of his original report.

    People with serious cognitive decline do not simply have verbal flubs or memory lapses of the sort both campaigns are constantly highlighting on social media. They avoid asking questions they fear might betray their loss of memory; they struggle to recollect the season, the time of day, the state they are currently in. They awkwardly attempt to hide their inability to recall recently relayed information in ways that simply underline its absence. They repeat innocuous statements that they do not realize they made minutes earlier. They pretend to know people they’ve never met and fail to recognize people they’ve known for decades. The late Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the clearest recent example of this in politics, was reported to have had incidents such as a meeting at which lawmakers had to “reintroduce themselves to Feinstein multiple times during an interaction that lasted several hours,” as the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2022.

    During his testimony before the House, Hur insisted that “partisan politics had no place whatsoever in my work.” He tried to have it both ways, insisting that his report was accurate while refuting the most uncharitable right-wing characterizations of Biden’s memory. But as legal experts pointed out after the report was released, Hur’s description of Biden’s memory was not a necessary element of his duties, and it is unlikely that someone with as much experience in Washington as Hur would be so naive as to not understand how those phrases would be used politically.

    Yet Hur’s report is itself something of a self-inflicted wound for Democrats, a predictable result of their efforts to rebut bad-faith criticism from partisan actors by going out of their way to seem nonpartisan. The age story caught fire in the press, not only because of genuine voter concern over Biden’s age but because this is the sort of superficially nonideological criticism that some reporters feel comfortable repeating in their own words, believing that it illustrates their lack of partisanship to conservative sources and audiences. Coverage of the Hillary Clinton email investigation reached saturation levels in 2016 for similar reasons.

    There are more parallels between those stories. Then-President Barack Obama appointed James Comey, a Republican, to run the FBI, in an effort to illustrate his commitment to bipartisanship; Attorney General Garland’s decision to appoint Hur probably had similar intentions. Comey, like Hur, declined to press charges but then broke protocol. In Comey’s case, he did so by first holding a press conference in which he criticized Clinton, and later, during the final days of the presidential campaign, announcing that he was reopening the investigation into Clinton while keeping the bureau’s investigation into Trump a secret. A 2017 analysis published by FiveThirtyEight makes a compelling argument that the latter decision threw a close election to Trump.

    Helen Lewis: Biden’s age is now unavoidable

    For reasons that remain unclear to me, Democrats seem to have internalized the Republican insistence that only Republicans are capable of the fairness and objectivity necessary to investigate or enforce the law. Any lifelong Republican who fails to put partisanship above their duties is instantly and retroactively turned into a left-wing operative by the conservative media. Acting to prevent complaints of bias (as opposed to actually being fair) is ultimately futile: Comey’s last-minute gift to the Trump campaign didn’t prevent Trump from smearing him as a liberal stooge.

    These efforts to work the refs pay off. Right-wing criticism of Obama probably influenced him to pick a grandstanding Republican to head the FBI, an agency that has never been run by a Democrat, just as it likely influenced Garland to pick a grandstanding Republican to investigate Biden. Conservative criticism of the mainstream press leads too many journalists to attempt to prove they aren’t liberals, which results in wholesale amplification of right-wing propaganda to deflect criticisms that the media aren’t objective; the facts become a secondary concern.

    Fairness, objectivity, and due process are important values, but there is a difference between upholding them and seeking to convince everyone that that’s what you’re doing. Performatively pursuing the latter can easily come at the expense of the former. If you try too hard to convince people you are doing the right thing instead of just doing the right thing, you often end up doing the wrong thing.

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    Adam Serwer

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  • What to expect from Robert Hur testimony on Biden classified documents probe

    What to expect from Robert Hur testimony on Biden classified documents probe

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    What to expect from Robert Hur testimony on Biden classified documents probe – CBS News


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    A House committee will question former special counsel Robert Hur Tuesday morning about his controversial report on President Biden’s handling of classified documents. CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane and CBS News senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang have a preview.

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  • Do the Hur Report and Biden’s Age and Memory Really Matter?

    Do the Hur Report and Biden’s Age and Memory Really Matter?

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    Reporters have reached out to a number of neurologists and other experts on memory and aging since the Hur Report came out. Overall, they have have emphasized that a person’s cognitive abilities cannot be accurately assessed based on anecdotes, and with that acknowledged, there wasn’t anything particularly concerning or unusual about the president’s memory lapses as detailed in the report.

    As several doctors made clear to the New York Times, neither they — nor Special Counsel Hur, nor any pundits — are in a position to diagnose Biden, and Hur’s conjecture on the matter (that Biden has a “faulty memory”) was definitely not based on science:

    In its simplest form, the issue is one that doctors and family members have been dealing with for decades: How do you know when an episode of confusion or a memory lapse is part of a serious decline? The answer: “You don’t,” said David Loewenstein, director of the center for cognitive neuroscience and aging at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. The diagnosis requires a battery of sophisticated and objective tests that probe several areas: different types of memory, language, executive function, problem solving, and spatial skills and attention. The tests, he said, determine if there is a medical condition, and if so, its nature and extent. 

    A diagnosis might also require comparing recent memory test results to ones taken at least several years ago; understanding what precisely a person is and isn’t forgetting; interviewing family members and close associates; and ruling out various other factors that could be affecting a patient’s cognitive function, like medication they are taking or a recent injury.

    And “neurologists say blanking on the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past, especially when under stress, can simply be part of normal aging,” reports NBC News:

    “If you asked me when my mother passed away, I couldn’t necessarily tell you the exact year because it was many years ago,” Dr. Paul Newhouse, clinical core leader for the Vanderbilt Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, said. Almost every older patient has trouble remembering people’s names, Newhouse said. “I think it’s by far the most universal complaint of every person as they age[.”] …

    Dr. Dennis Selkoe, co-director of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, agreed that forgetting names doesn’t actually provide much insight into potential memory problems. In fact, stress and a lack of sleep, can interfere with memory, no matter how old someone is. “Naming proper nouns is not an adequate basis to make a conclusion about whether an individual has a more consistent and more concerning substantive progressive memory disorder,” Selkoe said. …

    Overall, neurologists tend to worry less about a patient’s ability to remember remote memories from many years ago and more troubled by an inability to recall more recent events.

    And while everyone’s memory declines as they age, and recalling dates and names can become more challenging, it’s not necessarily some universal impairment, as several experts explained to the Washington Post:

    “It’s very clear that there are a number of changes that occur with aging and cognition that are just part of getting older,” said Bradford Dickerson, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, who’s studied cognitive super-agers. Declines in the ability to think and remember among the elderly are broad and almost universal, he continued. “There’s just not much cognitively that’s better in an 80-year-old than in a 20-year-old.” …

    Still, older brains can often compensate for their growing weakness, Dickerson and other researchers point out. “There’s evidence that older adults can strategically focus memory” on the most important information, [Harvard University psychology professor Daniel] Schacter said. Older brains often become more adept than younger brains at filtering irrelevant information or at making connections between experiences, the researchers agreed, because they’ve had more of them.

    Joel Kramer, the director of the Memory and Aging Center at University of California, San Francisco, made a similar point to Stat News:

    On average, an 80-year-old will not remember as well as a 60-year-old who won’t be remembering quite so much as a 40-year-old. But these are just general trends. And, you can’t really assume that this particular 80-year-old is going to remember less well than the average 40-year-old, or any 40-year-old. …

    When there’s a considerable amount of disease, you might expect a more broad-based decline in memory as well as other [mental] skills. But they are really quite dissociable. And in fact, one of the ways that a lot of older people compensate for their memory problems is by having very good reasoning and planning and judgment. Some people argue that as we get older, you see an increase in wisdom and judgment.

    There was a great study of airline pilots several years ago that showed that older pilots have slower reaction times, unquestionably, but they have more experience and better judgment. So this whole notion that because someone is 80 years old, they therefore have problems in memory and other skills, is completely bunk.

    In a New York Times op-ed, Dr. Charan Ranganath, the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at U.C. Davis, stresses that “there is forgetting and there is Forgetting”:

    If you’re over the age of 40, you’ve most likely experienced the frustration of trying to grasp hold of that slippery word hovering on the tip of your tongue. Colloquially, this might be described as ‘forgetting,’ but most memory scientists would call this “retrieval failure,” meaning that the memory is there, but we just can’t pull it up when we need it. On the other hand, Forgetting (with a capital F) is when a memory is seemingly lost or gone altogether. Inattentively conflating the names of the leaders of two countries would fall in the first category, whereas being unable to remember that you had ever met the president of Egypt would fall into the latter.

    Over the course of typical aging, we see changes in the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a brain area that plays a starring role in many of our day-to-day memory successes and failures. These changes mean that, as we get older, we tend to be more distractible and often struggle to pull up the word or name we’re looking for. Remembering events takes longer and it requires more effort, and we can’t catch errors as quickly as we used to. This translates to a lot more forgetting, and a little more Forgetting. Many of the special counsel’s observations about Mr. Biden’s memory seem to fall in the category of forgetting, meaning that they are more indicative of a problem with finding the right information from memory than actual Forgetting.

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    Chas Danner

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  • 2/9: CBS News Weekender

    2/9: CBS News Weekender

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    2/9: CBS News Weekender – CBS News


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    Catherine Herridge reports on a deadly plane crash on a Florida highway, earthquakes in Hawaii and California, and where the world’s largest iceberg is headed.

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  • How Biden campaign, allies are doing damage control after special counsel report

    How Biden campaign, allies are doing damage control after special counsel report

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    The Biden-Harris campaign, its surrogates and allies were forced to do damage control on Friday after special counsel Robert Hur’s report about President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents painted a scathing picture of his age and memory, raising new questions for voters nine months before the November election.

    Despite Hur not bringing criminal charges, his report levied what amounted to a political indictment against the 81-year-old president, with investigators writing that a main reason for not pursuing charges was because “Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

    Biden clapped back in a hastily-scheduled news conference Thursday night, just hours after the report was released, telling reporters, “I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing.”

    Full speech: President Biden responds Thursday night to the special counsel’s report on his mishandling of classified documents.

    The president’s top surrogates, from Vice President Kamala Harris to congressional Democrats, kept pushing back on Friday, dismissing the special counsel’s report as “politically motivated” and “inappropriate.”

    The Biden campaign declined to comment when asked how it’s trying to quell renewed concerns about the president’s age.

    A source familiar with the campaign’s thinking told ABC News that Republicans attacking the president’s age is nothing new, saying that strategy didn’t work in 2020 and won’t work in 2024, when the source said voters value experience and wisdom as well.

    Here are five ways Biden allies are striking back:

    Hur is a Trump appointee and Republican

    Biden surrogates have been quick to point out that Robert Hur, a Republican, was appointed by former President Donald Trump to be U.S. Attorney in Maryland in 2018. However, it was Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden-appointee, who chose Hur to lead the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.

    Some are now accusing Hur of having an agenda despite not having enough evidence to criminally indict Biden.

    “At the end of the day, it looks as though the special counsel couldn’t charge him with anything, so he just threw the books at him anyway,” said former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile, an ABC News contributor. “The report read like it was going to get published in the New York Post or on Trump campaign website. It did not read like a legal document.”

    Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., in an interview with ABC News on Thursday, called the report’s descriptions of Biden “partisan editorializing by a Republican-appointed prosecutor.”

    “This is a Republican special counsel who completely went out of his way to editorialize, to include material in his report that is unnecessary and irrelevant to what he was tasked with doing,” Goldman said, of Hur. “The fact that he’s a Republican and he’s exonerating President Biden, he knows he’s going to be under attack because Republicans want to create this false equivalency between President Biden and former President Trump.”

    Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, at an unrelated news conference on Friday, deemed the comments by Hur “unfair” and “unnecessary,” also noting he was a Republican appointee.

    Governor JB Pritzker and other Democrats defended President Joe Biden Friday after the DOJ’s classified documents report commented on his memory.

    “I smell a rat in the comments that were made,” he told reporters.

    Hur had no comment.

    Doesn’t compare to Trump’s classified docs case

    Biden aides and allies say the bottom line is that while the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents ended with charges, Biden fully cooperated, and Hur decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him.

    Juxtapose that, they say, to Trump’s case, in which he’s charged with obstructing efforts to secure the documents.

    Jim Messina, former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign manager, urged his social media followers not to equate a “heavily editorialized special counsel’s report” as a bigger liability than the 91 criminal charges pending against Trump. (Trump has denied all wrongdoing).

    “Hur, a lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn’t have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically,” Messina said in a post.

    “We’ve got to stop treating a single line in a gratuitously long, heavily editorialized special counsel’s report–in which no crime was found btw–by a partisan Republican investigator like it’s a bigger liability than Trump’s 91 criminal charges and being found liable for rape,” he said in another.

    Lauren Glassberg has the latest.

    Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, also highlighted on social media Friday the differences between Trump and Biden’s respective investigations.

    “Read the documents. It’s not hard. Biden fully cooperated. Trump obstructed at every turn,” he said in a post. “They know this. And they know how damaging their arguments are to Americans’ confidence in their democracy.”

    While Trump’s popularity among Republican voters has risen with each criminal indictment, according to his national polling average on 538, Biden’s mishandling of documents might not be as easily accepted by his base.

    There’s also a gap when it comes to perceptions of Trump, 77, and Biden, 81. A recent NBC News poll found 62% of voters have “major concerns” about Biden’s age whereas only 34% have “major concerns” about Trump’s age.

    The special counsel has no business making ‘gratuitous’ statements

    “Gratuitous” is swiftly becoming a buzzword for Democrats to describe the language they take issue with in Hur’s report.

    “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized, could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly, politically motivated, gratuitous,” said Vice President Kamala Harris, a former federal prosecutor. “When it comes to the role and responsibility of a prosecutor in a situation like that, we should expect that there will be a higher level of integrity than what we saw,” she added.

    The Democratic National Committee War Room on Friday blasted a press email listing nearly a dozen instances of other prosecutors and legal experts questioning whether Hur’s comments on Biden’s memory were appropriate, with the email characterizing them as “political cheap shots that came straight from MAGA Republican talking points.”

    Among the voices was former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, who said in a post on X that the report had “many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions.”

    Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office, was among the first to characterize Hur’s criticisms of Biden’s memory as “inaccurate, gratuitous and wrong.”

    Recounting personal Biden stories about mental agility

    Biden allies are also offering first-hand accounts of Biden’s sharpness as they face renewed questions about his mental acuity.

    Goldman has recounted in multiple interviews how he spoke with Biden the day before the president’s voluntary interview with the special counsel on Oct. 8, the day after Hamas attacked Israel.

    “He was incredibly on point. His recall, his knowledge of a very tricky geopolitical situation was remarkable right off the bat. And he had spoken to a number of leaders, and he knew exactly where the pressure points were,” Goldman said. “And that’s where his age is so beneficial because he has 50 years of foreign policy experience.”

    DNC Chair Jaime Harrison also shared his Biden story in a post, moments after the president’s impromptu Thursday night news conference.

    “On AF1 I chatted with him on a myriad of topics from politics to family. Saw him bring down the house in SC talking about the promises made and the promises kept!” Harrison assured his followers.

    Other Democrats are flatly stating the undeniable truth: Biden is old.

    But so, they add, is Trump.

    “President Biden and former President Donald Trump have both old, and if that’s the only issue in the 2024 campaign, then the American people will have to judge between two elderly men,” Brazile said. “The president has has acknowledged that he is an elderly man, and he also has acknowledged that he’s still up to doing the work on behalf of the American people. I don’t know what else we can say.”

    Special counsel Robert Hur will not charge President Joe Biden for his handling of classified documents while out of office despite willful retention.

    The youngest member of Congress, Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., in a press call for the Biden-Harris campaign on an unrelated topic on Friday, flatly acknowledged Biden “is old” but deflected to the administration’s record, which he said is what Democrats will run on.

    “Number one, yes. OK. President Biden is old. OK. Yeah. It doesn’t sound like breaking news to me,” said Frost, who is 27. “When it comes down to how this is gonna impact folks down ballot and how Joe Biden’s candidacy will impact folks down ballot, I see nothing but positivity — because we’re looking at an agenda and we’re looking at a record that is positive.”

    Biden isn’t the only one confusing names – so are Trump and Johnson

    The report alleging Biden couldn’t recall the years he served as vice president or when his son, Beau, died, followed the president twice this week confusing European leaders with their dead predecessors — instances his allies are dismissing as common mistakes.

    “If he had a momentary blip where he couldn’t remember, as his mind is racing from the war in the Middle East to the questions that he’s been asking, I think that’s understandable for any of us,” Goldman told ABC News Live.

    After Biden mistakenly called Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi the president of Mexico during his news conference, surrogates were quick to pounce on the fact that Biden isn’t the only big-name politician to recently confuse a name.

    Goldman called it “nit-picking” and “inappropriate,” he said, “unless you’re also going to do it with Speaker Mike Johnson or anyone else who makes a mistake.”

    Notably, the House speaker confused Iran with Israel last week on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, and Trump, at a rally last month, twice mentioned Nikki Haley when he meant Nancy Pelosi. Trump has also repeatedly confused former President Barack Obama with Biden at recent rallies.

    Copyright © 2024 ABC News Internet Ventures.

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  • Biden delivers fiery remarks after special counsel classified docs report

    Biden delivers fiery remarks after special counsel classified docs report

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    A special counsel report released Thursday found evidence that President Joe Biden willfully retained and shared highly classified information when he was a private citizen, including about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, but concluded that criminal charges were not warranted.

    The report from special counsel Robert Hur resolves a criminal investigation that had shadowed Biden’s presidency for the last year. But its bitingly critical assessment of his handling of sensitive government records and unflattering characterizations of his memory will spark fresh questions about his competency and age that cut at voters’ most deep-seated concerns about his candidacy for re-election.

    Beyond that, the harsh findings will almost certainly blunt his ability to forcefully condemn Donald Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in November’s presidential election, over a criminal indictment charging the former president with illegally hoarding classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Despite abundant differences between the cases, Trump immediately seized on the special counsel report to portray himself as a victim of a “two-tiered system of justice.”

    Yet even as Hur found evidence that Biden willfully held onto and shared with a ghostwriter highly classified information, the special counsel devoted much of his report to explaining why he did not believe the evidence met the standard for criminal charges, including a high probability that the Justice Department would not be able to prove Biden’s intent beyond a reasonable doubt, citing among other things an advanced age that they said made him forgetful and the possibility of “innocent explanations” for the records that they could not refute.

    In remarks at the White House, Biden denied Hur’s assertion that he shared classified information, saying, “I did not share classified information. I did not share it with my ghostwriter.”

    He also angrily lashed out at the special counsel for questioning his recollection of his late son Beau’s death from cancer. “How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden asked, saying he didn’t believe it was any of Hur’s business.

    And in response to Hur’s portrayal of him, Biden insisted to reporters that “My memory is fine,” and said he believes he remains the most qualified person to serve as president.

    Biden’s lawyers blasted the report for what they said were inaccuracies and gratuitous swipes at the president. In a statement, Biden said he was “pleased” Hur had “reached the conclusion I believed all along they would reach – that there would be no charges brought in this case and the matter is now closed.”

    He pointedly noted that he had sat for five hours of in-person interviews in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s October attack on Israel, when “I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”

    “I just believed that’s what I owed the American people so they could know no charges would be brought and the matter closed,” Biden said.

    According to the report, the special counsel “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified information after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. These materials included (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.

    The materials were found in “the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home,” the report said.

    Read the full report below:

    Still, Hur’s office felt that the “evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

    Notably, Hur believed that at trial Biden could come across not only as “sympathetic,” but forgetful and not capable of the willfulness required to convict.

    “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the report said. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

    Garage box and storage closet of President Joe Biden’s garage taken on Dec. 21, 2022, in a photo released by the Department of Justice.

    Department of Justice.

    Attorneys for Biden blasted the special counsel’s characterization of the president’s memory and recollections during his two-day interview with investigators in October.

    “We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate,” wrote Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, and Bob Bauer, a personal attorney for the president. “In fact, there is ample evidence from your interview that the President did well in answering your questions about years-old events over the course of five hours.”

    The attorneys noted that the interviews took place in the midst of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, when Biden was busy “conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.”

    “It is hardly fair to concede that the President would be asked about events years in the past, press him to give his ”best” recollections, and then fault him for his limited memory,” they wrote.

    Biden, speaking Thursday afternoon in Virginia, noted the differences between his case and Trump’s, and how the special counsel in his probe had decided not to press charges.

    “This matter is now closed,” Biden said.

    Hur’s report said investigators found documents marked classified from as far back as the 1970s, including a box labeled “International Travel 1973-1979” containing materials from Biden’s trips to Asia and Europe that included “roughly a dozen marked classified documents that are currently classified at the Secret level.”

    Interior of President Joe Biden

    Interior of President Joe Biden’s garage storage closet containing Senate documents, Jan. 20, 2023, in a picture released by the Department of Justice.

    Department of Justice

    According to the report, among the classified documents Biden retained were materials documenting his opposition to the troop surge in Afghanistan, including a classified handwritten memo he sent President Obama over the 2009 Thanksgiving holiday, which FBI agents recovered from Biden’s Delaware home and its garage.

    Asked in his interview with investigators about handwriting on a folder containing marked classified documents about Afghanistan, the report said Biden “identified the handwriting as his, but said he recalled nothing about how the folder or its contents got into his garage.”

    The report lays out that Biden, in writing his 2007 and 2017 memoirs, worked with a ghostwriter, and in a recorded conversation with the ghostwriter a month after he left office, referenced the 2009 memo — saying that he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”

    At that time, Biden was renting a home in Virginia, the report says, and met the ghostwriter there to work on second memoir. He moved out of the Virginia home in 2019 and consolidated his belongings in Delaware, where the report says FBI agents later found the documents marked classified about the Afghanistan troop surge in his garage.

    Blue folder labeled "Afghanistan" in a box in President Joe Biden's garage in a picture released by the Department of Justice.

    Blue folder labeled “Afghanistan” in a box in President Joe Biden’s garage in a picture released by the Department of Justice.

    Department of Justice

    As such, the report says “evidence supports the inference,” that when Mr. Biden said the comment in 2017, he “was referring to the same marked classified documents about Afghanistan that FBI agents found in 2022 in his Delaware garage.”

    The report also said that Biden “created” his own classified documents via his own handwritten notes in notebooks and notecards, some of which Biden brought home with him and stored in “unsecured locations that were not authorized to store classified information– even though the notebooks.”

    The report said Biden used notebooks filled with sensitive materials to write his 2017 memoir, allegedly acknowledging to his ghostwriter that some of the documents he relied on might be classified.

    “In writing ‘Promise Me, Dad,’ Mr. Biden relied extensively on the notebooks containing the notes he took during his vice presidency,” said the report. The notebooks contained “notes of meetings Mr. Biden attended as well as entries about his other activities during this period. Many of the meetings related to foreign policy and classified information, including the President’s Daily Brief, National Security Council meetings, and other briefings. Some of these entries remain classified up to the Secret level,” said the report.

    Hur’s long-anticipated report was released Thursday, hours after the White House reviewed the document and announced that “in keeping with his commitment to cooperation and transparency,” the president would not assert executive privilege over any portion of the report.

    Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office, said in a statement that the president’s legal team had completed a review of the report and that “in keeping with his commitment to cooperation and transparency,” the president would not assert executive privilege over any portion of the report.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week informed key lawmakers that Hur had concluded his investigation, which examined how approximately two dozen classified documents wound up at Biden’s personal home and office.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland appears before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Sept. 20, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

    AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

    The records in question date back to Biden’s time as vice president, and at least some include “top secret” markings, the highest level of classification.

    Garland appointed Hur as special counsel in January of 2023, after aides to the president discovered a batch of ten documents at the Penn-Biden Center in Washington, D.C., where Biden kept an office after his vice presidency.

    A second discovery of additional records in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home precipitated Garland’s decision to assign Hur as special counsel, ABC News reported at the time.

    The report stated that “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023.”

    Investigators interviewed as many as 100 current and former officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, and Hunter Biden, the president’s son. In October, Hur’s team spent two days interviewing Biden himself.

    ABC News previously reported that sources who were present for some of the interviews, including witnesses, said that authorities had apparently uncovered instances of carelessness from Biden’s vice presidency, but that — based on what was said in the interviews — the improper removal of classified documents from Biden’s office when he left the White House in 2017 seemed to be more likely a mistake than a criminal act.

    The White House had emphasized from the beginning that it would cooperate with investigators. Biden himself repeatedly denied any personal wrongdoing and said he was “surprised” to learn of the documents’ existence.

    The Hur investigation has played out quietly against the backdrop of special counsel Jack Smith’s inquiry into former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified records, which culminated last year in a 40-count indictment, to which Trump has pleaded not guilty.

    Trump has sought to link his circumstances to Biden’s by trying to draw an equivalence between their conduct and calling his prosecution the result of a justice system improperly targeting Republicans.

    But records subsequently released by the National Archives indicate that Biden’s legal team cooperated with National Archives officials, whereas federal prosecutors have accused Trump of deliberately withholding records he knew to be classified from investigators with the National Archives and, later, the FBI.

    Hur’s report drew that distinction, saying, “Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it.”

    “In contrast,” the report said, “Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.”

    The Associated Press contributed to this report.

    Copyright © 2024 ABC News Internet Ventures.

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  • Justice Department won’t file charges over Biden’s handling of classified documents

    Justice Department won’t file charges over Biden’s handling of classified documents

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    Justice Department won’t file charges over Biden’s handling of classified documents – CBS News


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    A special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice issued a report Thursday on President Biden’s handling of classified documents from his time as vice president, finding that no criminal charges were warranted. Robert Hur’s report did contain significant criticism of Mr. Biden’s handling of classified information, however. Major Garrett anchors a CBS News special report breaking down the report’s findings and the political implications.

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  • Biden Makes The Hur Report Backfire On Trump

    Biden Makes The Hur Report Backfire On Trump

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    President Biden seized on the report by Special Counsel Hur to talk about the classified documents crimes of Trump.

    What Did Biden Say About The Special Counsel Report And Trump

    Biden said:

    I was especially pleased to see the special counsel make clear the stark differences between this case and Donald Trump. As the special counsel wrote, and I quote, several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear. By the way, this is a Republican counsel. Most notably, after being given multiple chances, this is a continuation of the quote: he returned classified documents and avoided prosecution here, while Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite.

    This is a continuing quote, according to the indictment, he is not only refused to return documents for many months, he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the national archives, and the Department of Justice considered a search of multiple locations, including his homes, and set for a volunteer interview and, in other words, cooperated with the investigation. That is the distinction, among others. The bottom line is that the special counsel in my case decided against moving forward with any charges. This matter is now closed.

    To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.

    Video:

    Biden Turns The Hur Report To An Advantage

    The Hur report confirms that Biden committed no crime, but the Trump-nominated special counsel used his report to offer an opinionated characterization of President Biden’s memory that had nothing to do with the classified documents case.

    The President has turned the report to his advantage even though the White House is unhappy about the subjective characterizations because it gives the President an opportunity to discuss Trump’s alleged crimes.

    Biden will have plenty of chances to prove that his memory is fine, but all it will take is one felony conviction for Trump to be finished.

    A Special Message From PoliticusUSA

    If you are in a position to donate purely to help us keep the doors open on PoliticusUSA during what is a critical election year, please do so here. 

    We have been honored to be able to put your interests first for 14 years as we only answer to our readers and we will not compromise on that fundamental, core PoliticusUSA value.

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  • Biden interviewed in special counsel’s probe into classified documents found at his home, former office | CNN Politics

    Biden interviewed in special counsel’s probe into classified documents found at his home, former office | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden over the last two days participated in a voluntary interview with special counsel Robert Hur as a part of his classified documents investigation, the White House announced Monday.

    “The President has been interviewed as part of the investigation being led by Special Counsel Robert Hur,” White House counsel’s office spokesperson Ian Sams wrote in a statement Monday. “The voluntary interview was conducted at the White House over two days, Sunday and Monday, and concluded Monday.”

    “As we have said from the beginning, the President and the White House are cooperating with this investigation, and as it has been appropriate, we have provided relevant updates publicly, being as transparent as we can consistent with protecting and preserving the integrity of the investigation,” Sams continued, referring additional questions to the Justice Department.

    The interview marks the first major development in the case known to the public in months and stands in stark contrast to Biden’s predecessor. Former President Donald Trump never interviewed with special counsel Robert Mueller during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election despite extensive negotiations over a potential interview. Trump currently faces criminal charges in two separate special counsel investigations, including one regarding his own handling of classified documents after he left the presidency in January 2021.

    The interview comes months after Biden told CNN there had been “no such request and no such interest” for an interview with the special counsel in the investigation.

    A spokesperson for Hur, who oversees the Justice Department’s probe into classified documents found at Biden’s home and former private office, declined to comment to CNN.

    The interview was scheduled weeks ago, according to a person familiar with the matter. It came as Biden spent the three-day holiday weekend in Washington, a rare occurrence.

    The decision to stay at the White House seemed fortuitous as war erupted in Israel but in reality, the choice to skip traveling to one of his Delaware homes was weeks in the making so the president could sit for the interview. Few people inside the White House were aware of the plans, and there was little indication to those who were working there this weekend that the interview was in the works.

    On Saturday morning, the president woke up to urgent news from his senior advisers: Israel was under attack. He convened a meeting of his national security team at 8:15 a.m ET.

    The hours that followed would be filled with a whirlwind of activity for Biden, as he received multiple briefings by his top national security advisers, got on the phone with world leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, and addressed the nation from the State Dining Room.

    The president had a light public schedule Sunday and Monday with no public events, and reporters were given relatively early notice that Biden would not have any public appearances. On Monday, the president met with administration officials about the fighting in Israel in the morning and spoke with allies in the afternoon.

    Some of Biden’s closest advisers were spotted at the White House over the weekend, including chief of staff Jeff Zients and senior advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn, who is married to Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney. The group huddled in the Treaty Room of the White House residence on Saturday to go over Biden’s planned remarks on Israel.

    On Sunday, Biden remained out of public view, though he did speak with Netanyahu by telephone. His interview for the special counsel investigation went undetected by most of those in the building.

    That evening, he hosted a barbeque for White House residence staffers that included live music. On Monday, he continued the interview – even as events in Israel occupied his agenda. Biden stayed out of the public eye, with the White House calling a lid before noon Monday.

    Hur was appointed in January to investigate incidents of classified documents being found at Biden’s former Washington, DC, office and his Wilmington, Delaware, home. Upon announcing the investigation, Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out a timeline of the case that began with the Washington discovery in November 2022.

    The National Archives informed a DOJ prosecutor on November 4 that the White House had made the Archives aware of documents with classified markings that had been found at Biden’s think tank, which was not authorized to store classified materials, Garland said.

    The Archives told the prosecutor that the documents has been secured in an Archives facility. The FBI opened an initial assessment five days later, and on November 14, then-US Attorney John Lausch was tasked with leading that preliminary inquiry. The next month, on December 20, White House counsel informed Lausch of the second batch of apparently classified documents found at Biden’s Wilmington home, according to Garland’s account. Hours before the announcement of Hur’s appointment, a personal attorney for Biden called Lausch and informed him that an additional document marked as classified had been found at Biden’s home.

    The documents were found “among personal and political papers,” according to a statement from the president’s legal team. The FBI later searched Biden’s Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, home in February and found no additional documents.

    While Biden has not often commented on the case, he said in January that he was surprised to learn that classified documents were found in his former office.

    “I was surprised to learn there were any government records that were taken there to that office,” Biden said in response to a reporter’s question at a news conference in Mexico City, where he was attending a trilateral summit with the leaders of Mexico and Canada.

    He emphasized at the time that he did not know what was in the documents. As CNN previously reported, US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom were among them, according to a source familiar with the matter. Biden didn’t know the documents were there, and didn’t become aware they were there, until his personal lawyers informed the White House counsel’s office, one source familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The president said his attorneys “did what they should have done” by immediately calling the Archives.

    “People know I take classified documents, classified information seriously,” Biden added, saying that the documents were found in “a box, locked cabinet – or at least a closet.”

    After documents were found in his Wilmington home later in January, Biden said he was cooperating fully with the Justice Department. Biden added that the documents were in a “locked garage.”

    “It’s not like they’re sitting out on the street,” he insisted when a reporter asked why he was storing classified material next to a sports car.

    This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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  • Special counsel probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents appears to be nearing end | CNN Politics

    Special counsel probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents appears to be nearing end | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Special counsel Robert Hur’s interview of President Joe Biden is a sign that the classified documents investigation is nearing conclusion after casting a wide net that included dozens of witnesses during the ten-month long probe, multiple sources told CNN.

    The White House announced this week that Biden was questioned by Hur and his team over two days in a voluntary interview that CNN has reported was scheduled weeks earlier. While the White House has declined to discuss details of the questioning, including whether Biden invoked executive privilege, the interview is the first public development in months.

    One source told CNN that investigators have indicated they hope to wrap by the end of the year. As of now, it’s unclear if the probe will result in charges being filed, but sources familiar with the investigators’ line of questioning said they got the impression that’s unlikely, and there has been no discernible grand jury activity.

    The Justice Department has said that Hur will produce a final report explaining his findings from the investigation, a standard part of a special counsel’s work.

    “The breadth and depth of Hur’s work suggests that he is going to compile a detailed report to explain exactly how he conducted this investigation,” one source familiar with the investigation told CNN.

    Hur was appointed in January to investigate after classified documents were found at Biden’s former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC, and at his Wilmington, Delaware, home.

    Compared to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into classified materials found at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, including the indictment handed down in June, Hur’s probe into Biden has continued to operate quietly behind the scenes.

    Still, the protracted length and exhaustive nature of the investigation has frustrated top Biden aides who expected it to wrap up months ago given the relatively small number of classified documents involved, according to a person familiar with the White House’s thinking.

    That person said some Biden aides believe Attorney General Merrick Garland was overly cautious in selecting Hur, an appointee to two top Justice Department roles during the Trump administration, to ensure the investigation was politically unassailable.

    Investigators working for Hur have interviewed a broad spectrum of witnesses — from longtime advisor and current counselor Steve Ricchetti, to former White House legal and communications aides, to a former low-level aide who helped pack up the vice president’s residence at the end of the Obama administration, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

    Hur’s team also has reached out to people who worked in the Senate during the time Biden served in that chamber, sources said. That’s because some of the documents with classified markings date back to Biden’s time in the Senate, according to a statement from Biden’s personal attorney.

    As part of the investigation, Hur has sought to examine the handling of classified documents during Biden’s time in the Senate, a period before many of the strict procedures now used for handling classified documents, according to sources.

    That has caused Hur to confront the delicate issues of the Senate’s constitutional speech or debate protections, which limit the Justice Department’s ability to interview Senate staff without coordination with Senate lawyers, people briefed on the matter said.

    It’s unclear whether and how the Senate and Justice Department’s discussions over Senate-related interviews have been resolved. A special counsel spokesman declined to comment on the idea of no charges or on any discussions with the Senate.

    One person familiar with the investigation described members of Hur’s team as being professional but tedious in the level of detail they have sought in witness interviews. Investigators have asked about where staffers sat in the office, where they stored briefing books, and how they operated an office safe.

    Another person described a lengthy interview with FBI agents and lawyers focused on understanding everything surrounding specific documents. Investigators appeared to be following a process that identified meetings connected to specific classified documents or notes recovered from Biden properties, the person familiar with the interview said. Everyone who attended a meeting or briefing connected the document is being interviewed, the person said.

    Investigators appear to be trying to establish a chain of custody for the documents and the circumstances surrounding them to discern how the classified documents ended up in Biden’s office and home.

    Another source said: “The central question in this case is: Did the vice president of the United States intentionally take classified documents for personal use?”

    The challenge for investigators is how they assess culpability and the circumstances surrounding how the documents got to the Penn Biden Center and the president’s house in Delaware, the source said.

    A lawyer for one witness also described Hur’s process as being slow and methodical. Investigators interviewed this lawyer’s client earlier this year, but recently came back and asked his witness for additional documents.

    “They are certainly being sufficiently thorough, and there is a temptation to think they are doing some things twice,” the lawyer said.

    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to say Tuesday if the president answered all questions posed to him or invoked executive privilege during the interview with Hur. Jean-Pierre also wouldn’t say if the Biden administration requested that the interview be postponed following Hamas’ attack on Israel over the weekend.

    “He’s been very much focused on the issues of the – you know – horrific events that we have seen in Israel,” she said. “As president, he has to do multiple things at once, and that’s what you saw him do this weekend.”

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  • DOJ has spent over $9 million investigating Trump since special counsel was appointed | CNN Politics

    DOJ has spent over $9 million investigating Trump since special counsel was appointed | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department has spent over $9.2 million investigating former President Donald Trump since the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith in November, according to the first public accounting of his expenses.

    Smith’s office, leading the high-profile investigations into Trump, has spent more than $5.4 million between November and March 31, the Justice Department said. Other DOJ entities have spent an additional $3.8 million to support Smith.

    Smith is investigating efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prosecuting former Trump for allegedly retaining classified information after he left the White House.

    More than $2 million of that cost went to employee salaries, the report released Friday says. Another $1 million dollars paid for investigative support and more than $80,000 went to helping employees relocate while they worked for the special counsel. The reports run through March 31, 2023.

    The additional $3.8 million DOJ has spent includes payment for “hours worked by agents and investigative support analysts, as well as the cost of protective details for the Special Counsel when warranted.”

    While Smith’s topline number dramatically tops the amount that special counsels Robert Hur and John Durham spent in the same timeframe, about $600,000 and $1 million respectively, his spending on investigations into the Trump and his allies still pales in comparison to the nearly $32 million that Robert Mueller and other DOJ offices spent during his years-long prove into whether Russia swayed the 2016 election for Trump.

    Hur, who is leading the investigation into the handling of classified documents found at Joe Biden’s home and former private office, also spent a significant amount of his expenses on employee compensation. Hur was appointed just a few months after Smith and has not made any major public moves. DOJ spent an additional $572,000 in support of Hur, the report says.

    Durham, the special counsel appointed to investigate potential misconduct in the Trump-Russia probe, spent more than $7 million from the time he started his investigation as a special counsel, according to Friday’s filing. Additional DOJ expenditures related to it amount to $1.73 million.

    Durham’s work as a special counsel concluded in May after the release of a 300-page report, which strongly rebuked the FBI’s investigation into Trump, highlighting multiple errors in the origins of the bureau’s investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.

    The investigation, however, resulted in one guilty plea of an FBI lawyer who admitted to doctoring an email regarding a surveillance warrant. Durham’s other two prosecutions against a campaign lawyer for Hillary Clinton and a source for the Trump-Russia dossier both ended in acquittals.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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