Robert Hur testifies on Biden classified documents report: Live updates | AP News

Hur has confronted substantial pushback from Democrats on his decision to include unflattering assessments of Biden’s mental acuity, with Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, saying he made a conscious decision to “make a generalized statement.”

Schiff told Hur that he could not have been so naive as to not have appreciated that such a characterization would have created a “political firestorm” and “would be manipulated by my colleagues here on the GOP side of the aisle and by President Trump. You understood that, did you not?”

Hur, for his part, bristled at the suggestion that he should have omitted relevant observations from a report for public consumption or that his work or decisions were affected by politics.

“Politics played no part whatsoever in my investigative steps, my decisions and the words that I put in my report,” Hur said.

For years, Republicans in Congress have claimed that there are two standards of justice in America: one for conservatives and one for Democrats.

It has been such a centerpiece of their political strategy that last year, upon taking the gavel, House Republicans established a select committee dedicated to investigating the “weaponization” of the federal government against Republicans. The decision by Hur to not charge Biden is seen by the party as a continuation of this standard.

“These two reports are the culmination in my mind of the Department of Justice’s two standards and an example, again, of the Justice Department being weaponized against conservatives,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., said during his questioning of Hur.

He also said he got the resources he needed to carry out the yearlong probe and received no pressure to adjust either on what he found in his investigation or the conclusions he reached.

“The investigative steps that we took were my own. The judgment was my own. And the words in the report are my own,” Hur said. Garland didn’t remove anything from Hur’s report.

Hur’s status as a lawyer who has ascended in Republican legal circles was not lost on Democrats.

After walking through Hur’s background, including service as a top Justice Department official during the Trump administration, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia accused Hur of trashing and smearing Biden.

An angry Hur responded that he rejected that characterization and said that “partisan politics had no place whatsoever in our work.”

Explaining the large number of “jumbo” photographs in his home from his time in public life, Biden told of the time he “unfortunately, embarrassed the hell out of the leader of Mongolia.”

During his 2011 visit to the Central Asian country, Biden attended a cultural demonstration with the country’s prime minister, which included wrestlers, dancers, horseback riders and archery.

He continued: “I didn’t mean anything by it. I turned to the prime minister and handed it to him — the poor son of a bitch couldn’t pull it back. I was, I was like, oh, God.”

Hur found that Biden kept diaries containing highly classified information. But he wasn’t the first president to keep a diary in office. Diary-writing presidents include George Washington, John Quincy Adams and Ronald Reagan.

Reagan left the White House in 1989 with eight years of handwritten diaries and apparently kept them in his California home even though they contained top-secret information, Hur wrote.

Reagan and his wife would sometimes read aloud from them after dinner. Reagan’s possession of the diaries was well known, but the Justice Department took no known steps to get them back.

Classified information was only taken out when Nancy Reagan decided to put them on display in 2005.

▶ Read more about presidential diaries here.

The hearing was meant to focus on a legal document, but Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, cast the stakes in lofty political and historical terms.

He scolded his fellow committee members for playing what he said were “stupid games” by trying to conduct a “memory test” for Biden — a president who he said had demonstrated his mental mettle through “soaring oratory” at the State of the Union address last week.

He said that the country in this election year faces a choice between “democracy” and “tyranny” and that the “tyrants and dictators of the world” stand to gain from the spectacle of the hearing.

“Do we remember fascism? Remember Nazism? Do we remember communism and totalitarianism? Have we completely forgotten the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents and prior generations?” Raskin asked.

It’s business as usual.

Biden is traveling a short distance up Pennsylvania Ave. to the headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, where he will meet top executives and hold a roundtable discussion with rank-and-file members of one of the nation’s most powerful unions.

Later today, he is set to meet with Poland’s president and prime minister to discuss ways that NATO allies can increase military support to better thwart Moscow’s military activity in Ukraine.

As lawmakers from both sides of the aisle interrogate Hur, the White House is beginning its defense of the president, responding to GOP allegations during the hearing in real time.

“Jim Jordan totally lying and misleading Americans,” Ian Sams, a White House spokesperson posted on X, formerly Twitter. “The Hur report found there were “innocent” explanations for the documents being mistakenly taken.”

“Why did he do it? Why did Joe Biden, in your words, willfully retain and disclose classified material?” Rep. Jim Jordan asked Hur, citing Biden’s decades of public service and access to classified documents. “I mean, he knew the law. He’d been in office like 50 years. Five decades in the United States Senate. Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Eight years as vice president. He got briefed every day.”

Hur responded that the “conclusion as to exactly why the president did what he did is not one that we explicitly address in the report.” He has reiterated that there was enough evidence to suggest Biden willfully retained the documents to prosecute the president.

Hur has repeatedly reminded GOP lawmakers that the principal statute at issue in the investigation requires evidence that a defendant willfully retained national defense information in an unauthorized location.

While Hur says he found some evidence of that — namely in Biden’s conversation with his ghostwriter — he concluded that there was not enough for a prosecution.

At one point, Rep. McClintock, a California Republican, asked Hur if that judgment shouldn’t be up to a judge or a jury. But Hur said that his job was to consider the evidence and make a judgment with respect to the strength of it.

In his report, Hur said Biden told investigators that when he described material in his notebooks to his ghostwriter as “classified,” he did not actually mean “classified.”

Biden said he may have used the word “classified” in the “generic sense” to refer “not to the formal classification of national security information, but to sensitive or private topics” to ensure his ghostwriter wouldn’t write about them, the report says.

But Hur said that was not believable. He noted that by that time, Biden had nearly 50 years of experience dealing with classified information. “It is not plausible that a person of his knowledge and experience used the term ‘classified’ in this context as a euphemism for ‘private,’” Hur wrote.

Republican Rep. Tom McClintock started his questioning of Hur by asking the former special counsel if he himself could take home secret documents, store them in his garage and read portions of it to friends or associates, as the president had.

“Congressman, I wouldn’t recommend it, but I don’t want to entertain any hypotheticals at this point,” Hur responded.

Though Justice Department regulations do indeed state that a special counsel must prepare a ‘confidential’ report to the attorney general, the department traditionally makes those documents public.

In other words, as Hur was working on his report, he almost certainly would have understood that the document was going to see the light of the day given past precedent — including the Trump-Russia report, which Hur at one point helped supervise.

In his opening statement, Hur defended his decision not to charge Biden and reiterated that his commentary about Biden’s age and memory were “necessary and accurate and fair.”

“Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe,” Hur said. “I did not sanitize my explanation nor did I disparage the president unfairly.”

“There are just three basic points that all Americans need to understand about Mr. Hur’s report. Number one, the special counsel exonerates President Biden. The very first line of the report says it all,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in his opening statement.

He went on to say that Biden also “offered complete and unhesitatingly cooperation with the special counsel’s investigation in the Justice Department.”

And lastly, Raskin added that Hur repeatedly “emphasizes that President Biden’s conduct contrasts sharply with that of former President Trump.”

Hur says his team identified evidence that Biden “willfully retained” classified materials. What evidence: an audio-recorded conversation with his ghostwriter in 2017 where Biden said that he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”

He was a private citizen then, working on the book “Promise, Me Dad” about the year his son Beau died. Hur says he also uncovered other recordings of Biden reading classified information out loud to the ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer.

Biden, for his part, said he couldn’t remember saying he’d found classified information. Biden said he probably told Zwonitzer about a memo he wrote to then-president Barack Obama about Afghanistan but also stressed it shouldn’t appear in the book, according to the transcript of the interview.

▶ Read more about Biden’s ghostwriter here.

Democrats wasted no time contrasting Biden and Trump’s behavior.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York is the top Democrat on the committee. He spent much of his opening statement focusing not on Biden but on Trump, whom he said had stored classified records “in the craziest of places” and obstructed government efforts to get them back. This was followed by a video of Trump forgetting the names of foreign leaders and details about his personal life.

Trump faces 40 felony counts in Florida accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents, including those about nuclear programs and military capabilities of the U.S. and other countries, at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

As an extended clip of Biden played in the hearing room, Hur looked straight ahead, away from the TV screens.

This is hardly surprising given the political stakes in an election year.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chairman of the committee, seized on Hur’s conclusion that there was evidence Biden had “willfully retained” classified information from his years as vice president before playing a clip of Biden’s initial response to the report.

Jordan largely glossed over Hur’s other finding that the evidence was not strong enough for a criminal case, except to note that Hur had written a jury might find the president to be a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Before the testimony began, demonstrators protesting the Israel-Hamas war filed into the hearing room. The group, which included Jewish peace activists, stood in pink T-shirts and wore red hands to reflect the bloody war that is ongoing in Gaza.

“We sure wish Congress was as concerned about genocide as it was about presidents retaining classified documents,” one of the protesters yelled as lawmakers took their seats on the dais.

The hearing will include surprise appearances by the top Republican and Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. Reps. James Comer of Kentucky and Jamie Raskin of Maryland plan to make opening statements at the start of the hearing despite not being members of the Judiciary Committee.

The appearance by the two men highlights how increasingly political investigations have become on Capitol Hill, with members of various committees wanting to get in on the action by defending their side of the issue. The Oversight and Judiciary committees have been working closely since the start of last year, joining forces to investigate the Biden family and the subsequent impeachment inquiry of the president.

Hur is minutes away from his much-awaited testimony, where he’s expected to defend his decision to include an unflattering assessment of Biden’s memory in his report.

According to his prepared remarks, he will insist that his characterizations of the president’s memory were “accurate and fair,” noting that “what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe. I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the President unfairly.”

As Hur pressed Biden on the location of other notebooks he may have used as vice president, he acknowledged wishing he was more organized.

Biden told Hur he had “no idea” where other notebooks containing foreign policy notes could be. Biden said his wife Jill had encouraged him to keep a diary while he was in the White House “for posterity’s sake,” like Ronald Reagan. But Biden said he never managed to do so.

“I said, don’t make me like Ronald Reagan. I’d joke. Every night, he’d come home and he’d write a diary about what happened that day, who he spoke to, classified, unclassified, just everything he’d write in it, and he kept it all,” Biden said.

But, Biden said, “I never was that organized.”

Biden has increasingly turned to humor to disarm political attacks about his age. And he appeared to do the same when special counsel Robert Hur opened the interview asking Biden to “put forward your best efforts and really try to get your best recollection” of events from several years ago.

Hur held one of the most powerful jobs in the Justice Department during a tumultuous time in the Trump administration, serving as the top aide to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the department’s second-in-command.

As the principal associate deputy attorney general, Hur helped run the day-to-day operations of the department in 2017 and early 2018. He also helped Rosenstein stay on top of Mueller’s progress in the Russia investigation. Hur held biweekly meetings with the special counsel’s team and reported back to Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general said in an interview.

Rosenstein said he hired Hur because he knew he would maintain a calm and steady demeanor and “approach cases in a nonpartisan way.”

▶ Read more about Hur’s career.

Biden cracked some jokes during his hours of interviews with the special counsel. During one exchange, he quipped: “The FBI knows my house better than I do.”

Later on, Biden said that he keeps binders of speeches that he’s given. “I just warn you all, never make one great eulogy, because you get asked to do everybody’s eulogy.”

And at the end of the first day of testimony, after Hur asked Biden detailed questions about the box of documents found in his garage where his prized Corvette was surrounded by workout equipment and boxes of memorabilia, Biden joked: “When am I going to get the rest of it cleared out.”

During his interview with Hur, Biden made crystal clear that he regards the notebooks where he made handwritten notes during his time in government as his personal property.

“They are mine,” Biden said at one point, according to the transcript.

That statement, when cited in the report, drew attention in part because it echoed Donald Trump’s repeated claims that classified material found in his possession belonged to him. Though Biden asserted that the information belonged to him, Hur’s team concluded that the notebooks were stored in an unauthorized location because they contained classified national security information.

When Biden told prosecutors that “every president before me has done the same exact thing,” a prosecutor on Hur’s team retorted: “And I’m not arguing with you about that right now, Mr. President.”

Hur’s report carefully explained how the criminal case accusing Trump of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort presents far more serious allegations.

Hur noted that Biden cooperated with investigators and agreed to searches of his homes. Trump, on the other hand, is accused of not only holding onto sensitive documents but obstructing justice “by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it,” Hur wrote.

▶ Read more about the Trump classified documents case.

While some Democrats have suggested that Hur might use the report to seek elected office, the Maryland Republican appeared to rule that out for his future.

During questioning about his assortment of political memorabilia in his home, Biden pointed to a fundraising item from his 2020 campaign and told the special counsel: “That is something, if you ever run for office, you’ve got to keep.”

Hur quickly replied: “That will never happen, sir.”

The transcript shows Biden joked to the special counsel that he hoped they didn’t find any revealing photos of his wife when special agents searched his Wilmington home.

It was a flash of the humor that Biden brought to the interview, where he also expressed frustration that he doesn’t get to drive his sports car as president.

Biden’s comment had initially been redacted by the Department of Justice for unspecified reasons, but that determination was reversed before the transcript was sent to lawmakers on Tuesday.

But consider yourself warned: At 345 pages in length, it’s not exactly a beach read.

One thing in particular about Hur’s report made Biden really angry, and it was that he mentioned the president couldn’t seem to remember when his son Beau had died. Hur used it as an example of the president’s memory lapses.

The transcript suggests that the exchange was less revealing about Biden’s memory than Hur let on, and that Biden’s recollection of it during his emotional White House remarks was incorrect.

Hur asked Biden about where he kept the things that he was “actively working on” while he was living in a rental home in Virginia immediately after leaving the vice presidency in January 2017. And in that context, it was Biden himself who brought up Beau’s illness and death as he talked about a book he’d published later in 2017 about that painful time.

“What month did Beau die?” Biden mused, adding, “Oh God, May 30th.”

A White House lawyer then chimed in with the year, 2015.

“Was it 2015 he died?” Biden asked again.

Biden went on to recount in detail the story contained in his book, “Promise Me, Dad,” of how his late son had encouraged him to remain engaged in public life after the Obama administration ended.

The Associated Press obtained a transcript of the Biden interviews, which were being turned over to Congress by the Justice Department on Tuesday just hours before the special counsel, Robert Hur, was going before the House Judiciary Committee to face questions about his investigation of the Democratic president.

Over five hours of interviews, Biden repeatedly told a special counsel that he never meant to retain classified information after he left the vice presidency. But he was also at times fuzzy about dates and said he was unfamiliar with the paper trail for some of the sensitive documents he handled.

Hur’s report paints a more textured picture of his discussions with prosecutors, filling out some of the gaps left by Hur’s accounting of the exchanges.

▶ Read more about what’s in the Biden interview transcript.

President Joe Biden welcomes the finding of a special counsel report that he would not face criminal charges in his handling of classified documents. (Feb. 8)

Biden’s political opponent, Donald Trump, won’t be in the committee room and the hearing isn’t about him. But look for Democrats to mention his name over and over again in an attempt to distinguish Biden’s actions from Trump’s when it comes to the mishandling of classified information.

Trump is charged with illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate and obstructing government efforts to get them back. Prosecutors in that case say they’ve accumulated a massive body of evidence showing that Trump willfully broke the law.

Hur, by contrast, has said that though he found evidence that Biden had willfully retained classified information, that evidence was not strong enough for a criminal case.

Ahead of his testimony, Hur has formally resigned from the Justice Department.

That’s to be expected given that his work has been completed and it’s the same step that two recent other special counsels, Robert Mueller and John Durham, had taken after submitting their reports and before testifying on the Hill.

Even so, don’t expect Hur to say too much more about his work than if he were still on the job as special counsel.

The special counsel report dropped in February after a yearlong investigation into the improper retention of classified documents by Biden from his time as a senator and as vice president.

Biden was absolved of criminal behavior, but it’s Donald Trump who may prove to benefit the most from the investigation.

The report says there was evidence that Biden “willfully” retained and disclosed highly classified materials when he was a private citizen. And it highlights his confusion and “significantly limited” recall of events related to the documents.

▶ Read the AP’s takeaways from the special counsel report.

A big question will be how far beyond his 345-page report Hur goes in his testimony.

If past is precedent, the answer is not very. Hur is the third Justice Department special counsel in the last five years to face questions from lawmakers.

Though each hearing has afforded members of Congress an opportunity to score political points, the two earlier special counsels, Robert Mueller and John Durham, worked hard to avoid straying beyond their reports and Hur will tell the committee that he intends to follow the same tradition.

That approach could still generate fireworks, but if Hur sticks to that plan, it means he likely won’t be producing significant new revelations in his testimony.

Some have suggested Hur was quick to accept the invitation to speak before the House Judiciary Committee.

The panel, led by Trump loyalist Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, has spearheaded many of the congressional investigations into the president, including the floundering effort to impeach him.

Hur determined in a report made public last month that no criminal charges were warranted in the president’s handling of classified documents after he left the vice presidency.

But in explaining how he had arrived at his decision, Hur wrote that Biden would likely present himself to a jury “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He suggested Biden could not even remember during questioning when his adult son Beau had died.

Democrats have lashed out at Hur over the remarks about Biden’s age and mental acuity. They argue the digs were unnecessary and could help Republicans trying to unseat Biden in 2024.

Some Biden aides and allies have suggested that Hur, a Republican appointed to his role as U.S. attorney by Donald Trump, is a political partisan. Hur’s defenders say he has shown throughout his career that his work is guided by only facts and the law — not politics.

A review of Hur’s professional life shows he’s no stranger to politically charged investigations. He prosecuted former elected officials as Maryland’s chief federal law enforcement officer. And as a Justice Department official, he helped monitor special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Hur was handpicked to lead the Biden investigation by Attorney General Merrick Garland, who was aware of both Hur’s career history and his political affiliations. Garland has been determined to preside over an apolitical Justice Department as the agency probes not just Biden and Trump, but also Biden’s son Hunter.

▶ Read more about Hur’s career and why he’s in the spotlight now.