Top legal and political experts are taking a closer look at Special Counsel Robert Hur‘s final 388-page report on his extensive, 13-month investigation into President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents from his time as Vice President, with several arriving at similar conclusions: it was, they say, a political or partisan “hit job.”
Longtime former Obama senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer, who worked on the successful 2008 campaign, transition, and in the Obama White House, published an essay, “Thoughts on the Partisan Attack on Biden’s Memory.”
“The Special Counsel report is going to make Biden’s age and competence centerstage for the foreseeable future,” Pfeiffer warns, again stating, “this report is a partisan hit job.”
“While the report concluded that Biden’s conduct was not worthy of being charged with a crime, the report is being treated as a disaster for the President,” he observes, noting, “The press went into full feeding frenzy mode.”
“Hur, who worked for Trump before being appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden, filled his report with attacks on Biden’s memory and mental faculties. In the report, Hur goes out of his way to paint a damning portrait of the President. He cites several examples of memory lapses and describes Biden as a ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.'”
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Pfeiffer declares Hur’s report is “very bad and poses some real political peril for Biden.”
He also notes, “It’s hard to read the report and not think that, without the ability to charge Biden with a crime, Hur wanted to damage him politically,” but also says, “the Special Counsel made it very clear that there were real differences in how Biden and Trump dealt with classified information.”
Pfeiffer points to this passage from Hur’s report:
“It is not our role to assess the criminal charges pending against Mr. Trump, but several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear. Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts. 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, 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.”
But Pfeiffer also offered additional pushback to Hur’s claims, in a section titled: “If Biden’s Memory Were This Bad, We Would Know.”
“If Biden was regularly misremembering obvious pieces of information or making other mistakes that suggested he was not up to the job, it would be in the press. Washington is not capable of keeping something like that secret.”
Obama Attorney General Eric Holder blasted Hur and his own former Dept. of Justice: “Special Counsel Hur report on Biden classified documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions. Had this report been been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised.”
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Professor of law, MSNBC legal contributor, and former U.S, Attorney Joyce Vance advises: “Move on. Robert Hur crossed a line. He doesn’t need any more oxygen.”
Meanwhile, other top experts also weighed in.
Political pollster and MSNBC/NBC News political analyst Cornell Belcher writes, “It wasn’t just a mere typical political hit job, it was a deeply personally offensive hit job that invoked his dead son.”
Jim Messina, the Obama White House Deputy Chief of Staff who went on to run the successful Obama-Biden 2012 re-election campaign says, “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 also writes: “Let’s be clear–the special counsel isn’t a dummy and we should be very careful not to take the bait after Comey pulled this in 2016. 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.”
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, an attorney and former Republican U.S. Congressman, responding to Messina, notes that Hur “couldn’t indict Biden legally so he tried to indict Biden politically.”
And David Rothkopf, the popular foreign policy, national security, and political affairs analyst and commentator, responding to Scarborough adds: “This. Exactly right. He had no evidence so he offered snide little lies instead. He turned a DoJ report into the Burn Book from Mean Girls.”
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