White House Braces for Embarrassing Testimony From Special Counsel Hur, Who Wrote Report About Biden’s Mental Competence

President Biden’s mental acuity, or lack thereof, will come into the spotlight once again when the special counsel who accused him of being mentally diminished, Robert Hur, testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Mr. Hur will appear before the panel at the invitation of the committee’s chairman, Congressman Jim Jordan. He will answer questions about the president’s “willful” and improper retention of classified information in his garage at his Wilmington home and at his offices in Pennsylvania and at the District of Columbia. Mr. Hur made his way into national headlines in February when he released his report detailing Mr. Biden’s mishandling of classified information. Even though the president acted willfully, Mr. Hur argued, it was not worth trying to prosecute him because a jury would view the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and would be unlikely to issue a conviction.By contrast, Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted President Trump on multiple felony counts for illegally storing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.Mr. Hur interviewed Mr. Biden for more than five hours over the course of two days in October 2023, immediately after Hamas’s attack on Israel. During that sit-down, Mr. Biden allegedly forgot the year of his son’s death and failed to recall key dates from his life, including when he left the vice presidency. “Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” Mr. Hur wrote in his report to Attorney General Garland. Mr. Biden told investigators that he had shared documents related to national security with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, who lacked security clearance and was writing Mr. Biden’s post-vice presidency memoir.“In a recorded conversation with his ghostwriter in February 2017, about a month after he left office, Mr. Biden said, while referencing his 2009 Thanksgiving memo, that he had ‘just found all the classified stuff downstairs,’” Mr. Hur wrote. The president lashed out quickly and fiercely the day Mr. Hur’s report was made public. Speaking to reporters the same day the report was released, Mr. Biden defended his own mental acuity and said Mr. Hur had no right to raise the issue of his son’s death. “I was in the middle of handling an international crisis,” Mr. Biden said, noting that he did his interview with Mr. Hur just days after the October 7 attack in Israel. “I just believed that’s what I owed the American people so they could know no charges would be brought and the matter closed.”During that press appearance, Mr. Biden confused the leaders of Egypt and Mexico, making things worse.The Judiciary and Oversight committees have already subpoenaed a copy of that interview transcript from the Department of Justice, saying that they are “concerned that President Biden may have retained sensitive documents related to specific countries involving his family’s foreign business dealings.”Mr. Trump has vigorously complained that he’s been criminally charged by the justice department, while Mr. Biden himself was not, for the same crime.A spokesman for the justice department and a spokesman for the Judiciary Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the transcript had been transferred to the committee.

White House Braces for Embarrassing Testimony From Special Counsel Hur, Who Wrote Report About Biden’s Mental Competence

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