House Republicans seek testimony from special counsel in Biden classified documents probe

Republicans in the House of Representatives have reportedly reached out to Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur about the possibility of his testifying before the Judiciary Committee over his investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents.

Mr Hur, a Republican former US attorney for Maryland appointed to the task by US attorney general Merrick Garland, caused a furore last week after publishing a report that found the president had “wilfully” held onto highly-sensitive material after leaving office as Barack Obama’s vice president in January 2017 and that they had not been securely stored at his Delaware home or Washington DC office.

He did not charge Mr Biden with a crime but did include an astonishingly personal attack, describing his subject as likely to appear to a jury as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

That assertion added fuel to the political fire already burning around the president’s alleged cognitive decline and seeming frailty as he seeks a second term in the White House at the age of 81.

The president himself reacted angrily to Mr Hur’s editorialising at an impromptu press conference organised to address the 388-page report, particularly its author’s claim that he could not remember the precise year his eldest son Beau Biden had passed away from brain cancer.

“How the hell dare he raise that?” the president fumed.

“Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business!”

However, Mr Biden only succeeded in making matters worse during the same session when he confused the presidents of Mexico and Egypt, a blunder coming in the same week that he had mixed up Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel with the