Dem
51
GOP
49
Robert Hur, former special counsel, testified before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, discussing with them his report on the classified documents found at Joe Biden's residences and office.
The reason that Hur is now "former special counsel" is that he resigned from the Department of Justice on Monday, so that he would not be bound by the ethical rules that constrain DoJ staff. He also wouldn't rule out, during his testimony, that he may be interested in serving in a second Trump administration. Neither of these things help Hur's case that he is fair and balanced.
The squabbling that took place during the hearing is, in our view, largely uninteresting. As you might expect, partisans on both sides of the aisle engaged in a fair bit of grandstanding. The main takeaway is that the Democrats hammered Hur for reaching conclusions that he was not qualified to reach (e.g., about Biden's mental capacity), while the Republicans hammered him for not bringing charges against the President. We suspect that Hur's odds of future government employment are not good, regardless of what party controls the White House.
The far more important story, we think, is that The Washington Post laid hands on the transcript of Hur's conversation with Biden, and it turns out that both men were guilty of mischaracterizing what happened. Hur, readers will remember, claimed that the President could not remember when his son died. In truth, Biden remembered the exact month and day, and then, before he had a chance to add the year, a couple of other people in the room volunteered it. Thereafter, the President launched into an extended narrative of what happened after Beau Biden passed, and how that influenced his decision not to mount a campaign for president. This simply is not a description of someone whose mind is failing him.
Meanwhile, as Biden defended himself following the release of the report, he and his surrogates insinuated that Hur was kind of an aggressive jerk during portions of the questioning. This does not appear to be an accurate characterization, either. A transcript cannot capture tone of voice or body language, of course, but during the questioning about Beau Biden, for example, Hur said: "Just allow me to say for a moment, I am so terribly, terribly sorry for your loss." That simply is not a description of someone who is behaving like a jerk.
When the Hur report was first released, we wrote:
Hur did not make available his recordings of the interviews he alludes to, which means that not only is the voting public unable to judge his assessments for themselves, but also that there is zero context. For example, were the misstatements Hur alludes to cherry-picked, or are they examples of something that happened dozens of times? Did they appear to be actual misstatements, or were they potentially a byproduct of Biden's lifelong stuttering issues? Was Biden well-rested, or was he fatigued? Was he preoccupied with the previous day's attack in Israel?
We got a number of e-mails proposing that we were carrying the water for Biden, and/or acting like his PR staff. That item was written by a historian, and any historian that trusted someone else's description of the evidence in these circumstances, given that we are talking about a partisan actor, would be tossed out of the profession on their ear. This case illustrates why such caution is warranted.
In the end, we think this is about the end of the line for this story. Between the truths revealed in the transcript and Biden's performance at the State of the Union, the "feeble old man" bit has been put to bed for now. It may yet rise again, but if it does, it won't be because of Robert Hur. (Z)