Five key takeaways from the House hearing on Robert Hur’s Biden report

The former special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, testified before a House committee on Tuesday in an often contentious hearing that found the witness on the receiving end of criticism from both Democrats and Republicans.

Here were the key takeaways from the House judiciary committee hearing:

In his report, which was released last month, Hur concluded that no criminal charges were warranted against Biden. While stating that Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice-presidency when he was a private citizen”, Hur assessed that a jury would probably view him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and thus would be unable to establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

After the report’s release, Democrats celebrated Hur’s recommendation against criminal charges, but they accused the special counsel of overstepping the bounds of his assignment by offering such a stinging opinion on Biden’s memory. Hur directly confronted that criticism in his opening statement on Tuesday.

“My task was to determine whether the president retained or disclosed national defense information ‘willfully’. That means knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids. I could not make that determination without assessing the president’s state of mind,” Hur said. “My assessment in the report about the relevance of the president’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair.”

When Republican members of the committee attempted to press Hur on whether he found Biden to be “senile”, he said, “I did not. That conclusion does not appear in my report.”

Democrats on the committee accused Hur of directly inserting himself into the 2024