{"id":4690,"date":"2024-02-15T14:11:05","date_gmt":"2024-02-15T06:11:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tingchao.xyz\/?p=4690"},"modified":"2024-02-15T14:11:09","modified_gmt":"2024-02-15T06:11:09","slug":"biden-attacked-hur-for-asking-him-when-beau-died-that-didnt-happen-sources-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tingchao.xyz\/?p=4690","title":{"rendered":"Biden attacked Hur for asking him when Beau died. That didn’t happen, sources say."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

President Joe Biden lashed out at Robert Hur last week over one particular line in the special counsel’s report on his handling of classified documents: that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow in the hell dare he raise that?\u201d Biden told reporters in an impromptu White House press conference. \u201cFrankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn\u2019t any of their damn business.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Hur never asked that question, according to two people familiar with Hur\u2019s five-hour interview with the president over two days last October. It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden\u2019s death, they said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biden raised his son\u2019s death after being asked about his workflow at a Virginia rental home from 2016 to 2018, the sources said, when a ghost writer was helping him write a memoir about losing Beau to brain cancer in 2015. Investigators had a 2017 recording showing that Biden had told the ghost writer he had found \u201cclassified stuff\u201d in that home, the report says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biden began trying to recall that period by discussing what else was happening in his life, and it was at that point in the interview that he appeared confused about when Beau died, the sources said. Biden got the date \u2014 May 30 \u2014 correct, but not the year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hur’s 345-page report absolved Biden of criminal wrongdoing while pointing to evidence that he took home and kept highly classified material. Even though Biden was found to have disclosed classified information to the ghost writer on three occasions, prosecutors concluded that they could not prove that the president knew it was classified information at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fiery criticism of the report from Biden supporters, though, has focused on Hur\u2019s characterizations of the president\u2019s memory. They say the report was filled with gratuitous details about Biden\u2019s memory issues, including that the president misremembered the year Beau died. They have also seized on Biden\u2019s statement that the special counsel asked him about the date of Beau\u2019s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhy in the hell are you asking that question?\u201d former Attorney General Eric Holder, a Democrat, said Monday on MSNBC, suggesting that Hur was “a rube, perhaps,” who had “shaded” what he put in the report. \u201cWhat does that have to do with the retention of classified documents?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First lady Jill Biden questioned in a fundraising letter whether Hur was using \u201cour son\u2019s death to score political points.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sources familiar with Biden’s view of the interview say Hur induced the president to bring up his son by asking a series of personal questions related to Beau. They included questions about Biden’s memoir, \u201cPromise Me, Dad,\u201d in which he writes about his son\u2019s battle with cancer and death in 2015. Hur also asked about Biden\u2019s work for the Biden Cancer Initiative, founded in Beau\u2019s memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These sources did not dispute that it was Biden, not Hur, who first mentioned a date for Beau\u2019s death. But they said Biden felt betrayed by the comments in Hur’s report about his memory and mental state. During the interview, Hur asked him to recall events years in the past as best he could, and Biden agreed to speak freely and expansively, rather than in the clipped and careful manner of a typical witness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exactly what Biden said about his son\u2019s death and other issues may ultimately become public. The two-day interview was audio-recorded and transcribed, and congressional committees are expected to push for its release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Justice Department, the special counsel\u2019s office and the White House declined to comment for this article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two people who know Hur well said that he had set out to write a balanced and thorough narrative that would explain why, despite significant evidence, he had concluded that no criminal charges would be warranted for Biden. Over the course of a yearlong investigation, Hur’s team examined 7 million documents and spoke with 147 witnesses, according to his report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Associates of Hur say that Biden’s claim that the special counsel quizzed the president, unprompted, about his son\u2019s death from cancer is an effort to take the focus off the special counsel’s findings regarding how Biden handled classified documents and his struggle to recall certain facts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The line of questioning about the memoir was directly relevant to the central issue of the investigation, the people familiar with the interview said. Hur\u2019s team had learned that Biden was recorded in 2017 telling the ghost writer that he \u201cfound all the classified stuff downstairs,\u201d at the Virginia rental home where the two were working on the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the interview, Biden told Hur that he didn\u2019t remember saying in 2017 that he had found classified documents in the home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hur\u2019s investigation determined that the documents Biden mentioned in 2017 were never turned over to the FBI and, in fact, were likely the same ones found in Biden\u2019s Delaware garage in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biden\u2019s struggle to recall the period when he worked with the ghost writer were among several exchanges during the two-day interview where he appeared to forget important facts, according to the report. Hur’s report also states that Biden\u2019s memory appeared to be significantly limited in the 30 hours of recorded interviews he conducted with the ghost writer in 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hur stated that those memory lapses were one reason he concluded that it would be difficult to convince a jury to convict Biden of intentionally mishandling classified information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Hur has come under criticism for his descriptions of what he viewed as Biden\u2019s \u201cdiminished facilities.\u201d Holder said on X that there were too many “gratuitous remarks” in Hur’s report that were “flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attorney General Merrick Garland has also been criticized by Democrats for releasing the full, unredacted version of the report. Special counsel rules require them to write confidential reports to the attorney general detailing and explaining their decisions on whether to file criminal charges in a case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an effort at transparency, Garland has pledged to make all special counsel reports public, consistent with the Justice Department track record of releasing most special counsel reports since the office came into being in 1999.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

William Barr, who was attorney general in the Trump administration, was harshly criticized for initially releasing his own two-page summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia report in 2018. Several weeks later, Barr released the full document.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People familiar with the matter say Garland first saw Hur’s report Feb. 5, three days before its release. Had the attorney general ordered any changes, he would have had to disclose those to Congress, as required by the special counsel regulations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a letter to Congress when he released the report, Garland said that he took no action to block any investigative steps by Hur, because nothing the special counsel did was \u201cso inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asked whether Garland has confidence in Biden\u2019s fitness for office, a DOJ spokeswoman replied, \u201cOf course.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was Garland who selected Hur, a longtime Republican and former federal prosecutor, as Biden special counsel. After graduating from Harvard University and Stanford Law School, Hur held multiple positions in the Justice Department, including serving as counsel to Christopher Wray, now the director of the FBI, when Wray was in charge of the department\u2019s criminal division.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the Trump administration, Hur was a top adviser to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who was overseeing Mueller\u2019s Trump-Russia investigation. Rosenstein said Hur is neither an ardent Trump supporter nor a partisan activist<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRob plays it straight,\u201d Rosenstein said in an interview. \u201cI think he wrote in that report what he believed to be the relevant facts in play as to whether or not to bring criminal charges.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From 2018 to 2021, Hur served as the U.S. attorney for Maryland, and won plaudits from the state’s Democratic senators, Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, who praised his \u201cexcellent service\u201d and said he “faithfully followed the facts and the law.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to federal campaign filings, Hur has donated to at least three Republican political campaigns, including $500 to former U.S. Attorney Christina Nolan, a Republican, in January 2022, when she was in the GOP Senate primary in Vermont, which she later lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public records show Hur also donated $200 to Maryland GOP Gov. Larry Hogan in 2017 and $201 to GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona during his presidential campaign in 2008. All three of those politicians are by today\u2019s standards moderate Republicans, and none were ardent Trump supporters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NBC News legal contributor Chuck Rosenberg says it\u2019s fair to question some of the language Hur used about Biden’s memory in his report, but not his decision to explore and explain Biden\u2019s memory issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf Hur was going to tell the attorney general that he declined to prosecute President Biden, then I believe he was also obligated to explain his rationale,\u201d Rosenberg wrote for the website Lawfare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Would Biden come across as forgetful? As sympathetic? As willful? As dissembling? As honest? These are crucial determinations prosecutors make all the time about witnesses and defendants,” he added. “Indeed, I cannot imagine writing a report to the attorney general and not including these assessments.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People who know Hur say he did not anticipate how his descriptions of the president\u2019s memory would resonate across the political landscape. They say he believed that when his report was released, he would likely come under immediate attack from Republicans who would accuse him of going soft on Biden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, one line in Hur’s 345-page report will likely live on in American presidential and political history: the special counsel’s assessment that Biden would come across to jurors as a \u201csympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Joe Biden lashed out at Robert Hur last week over one particular line in the special counsel’s report on his handling of classified documents: that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” \u201cHow in the hell dare he raise that?\u201d Biden told reporters in an impromptu White House […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":4691,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-usa"],"yoast_head":"\nBiden attacked Hur for asking him when Beau died. 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