WASHINGTON — Lawmakers turned a Tuesday hearing on President Joe Biden's handling of classified documents into a proxy battle between the Democratic president and Republican front-runner Donald Trump, as a newly released transcript of Biden's testimony last fall showed he repeatedly insisted he never meant to retain classified information after he left the vice presidency.
Special counsel Robert Hur, testifying for more than four hours before the House Judiciary Committee, stood steadfastly by the assessments in his 345-page report that questioned Biden's age and mental competence but recommended no criminal charges for the 81-year-old president, finding insufficient evidence to make a case stand up in court.
"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."
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The transcript of hours of interviews between Biden and the special counsel released Tuesday provide a more textured picture of the roughly yearlong investigation, filling in some of the gaps left by Hur's and Biden's accounting of the exchanges.
While Biden was adamant that he treated classified information seriously, the transcript shows he was at times fuzzy about dates and details and he said he was unfamiliar with the paper trail for some of the sensitive documents he handled.
The hearing played out just hours before Biden claimed the Democratic nomination and Trump was on the cusp of becoming the GOP standard-bearer. The party lines calcified almost immediately over which leader meant to hang on to classified documents, or rather, who “willfully” retained them — and who didn't.
Hur was the rare witness vilified all around, by Republicans angry over his decision not to charge the president, and by Democrats for his unflattering commentary about Biden.
Republicans argued Biden was given a pass by his own Justice Department and that Trump was unfairly victimized by prosecutors.
Democrats, for their part, stressed Biden's cooperation in the investigation and strongly contrasted that with the separate criminal case against Trump, who refused to return classified documents requested by the National Archives that he had at his Florida estate.
Biden’s team returned the documents after they were discovered, and the president cooperated with the investigation by voluntarily sitting for an interview and consenting to searches of his homes. Trump, by contrast, is accused of enlisting the help of aides and lawyers to conceal the documents from the government and seeking to have potentially incriminating evidence destroyed.
Hur, in his report, detailed how his findings about Biden were far different from those of special counsel Jack Smith about Trump, who has been charged with willfully retaining classified documents.
FBI agents searched Trump's Florida estate in 2022 and removed boxes of documents marked as classified after he refused multiple requests from the National Archives to return them.
Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the ranking Democrat, asked whether Biden's willingness to comply with investigators and turn over documents contributed to the decision not to charge him.
"That was a factor in our analysis," Hur said.
But the Democrats quickly bored into Hur, who was chosen by Biden's own attorney general, suggesting he was a political partisan doing Republican bidding via his written slights about Biden's age and memory. Hur took issue with the characterization.
"Politics played no part whatsoever in my investigative steps, my decisions and the words that in I put in my report," Hur responded.
Republicans, meanwhile, questioned how the two cases were really all that different.
Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., called it a "glaring double standard."
"Donald Trump's being prosecuted for exactly the same act that you documented Joe Biden committed," he told Hur.
Hur's report cited evidence that Biden willfully held on to highly classified information and shared it with a ghostwriter, based on audio of the conversations between the two men in which Biden said he had just come across some classified documents at his home.
According to the transcript, Biden told Hur he did not recall the exchange, or that he had actually discovered any documents. He said if he had discussed anything questionable with the ghostwriter, it was in referring to a 20-page sensitive memo he had written to then-President Barack Obama in 2009 arguing against surging troops in Afghanistan that he wanted to ensure didn't make it into publication.
Hur said he was aware of the need to explain in great detail why he decided not to charge the president and why the case didn't meet the standard for criminal charges. Such explanations are common but usually kept confidential.
But there's a tradition at the Justice Department to release such documents publicly and so 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.
"The need to show my work was especially strong here," Hur said. "The attorney general had appointed me to investigate the actions of the attorney general's boss, the sitting president of the United States. I knew that for my decision to be credible, I could not simply announce that I recommended no criminal charges and leave it at that. I needed to explain why."
He added that "the evidence and the president himself put his memory squarely at issue."