Democrats air Trump’s gaffes and criminal charges during hearing into Biden classified papers

It took fewer than 10 minutes into former Special Counsel Robert Hur’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee for the panel’s Democratic minority to offer their response to his report on his year-long probe into how documents with classification markings ended up in President Joe Biden’s Delaware home and former office in Washington, DC.

Mr Hur, a former Trump administration appointee at the Justice Department, sparked outrage last month among Mr Biden’s supporters — and from Mr Biden himself — when he attributed his decision not to seek any criminal charges against the president to his own judgment that he could not obtain a conviction because jurors might view Mr Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

The ex-Maryland US attorney also used the report to mischaracterise a section of the nearly 300-page transcript of Mr Biden’s two-day interview with him and his staff, claiming that the president did not remember when his late son, Beau Biden, passed away. He also described Mr Biden’s memory as “photographic” on some matters and reported that he was unable to state beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr Biden had any criminal intent with regard to the documents.

The response from Democrats? Look at Donald Trump!

The tone for the hearing was set early on, when New York Representative Jerry Nadler, the panel’s ranking Democrat, responded to Chairman Jim Jordan playing Mr Biden’s response to the report with a supercut of gaffes, slurred speech, and confused answers from Mr Trump, including one in which the former president could not remember the time period during which he was married to his second wife, Marla Maples.

The New Yorker, a veteran of the panel, used his opening statement to describe Mr