Key Biden lawyer Richard Sauber to depart White House in May

Washington CNN —

Richard Sauber, the White House lawyer who battled an onslaught of highly politicized Republican congressional inquiries and a special counsel investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, plans to leave the administration in early May.

Sauber, who has been in his role of special counsel to the president since May 2022, is expected to return to private practice. Rachel Cotton, a senior counsel at the White House Counsel’s Office who has served as Sauber’s deputy, will replace him.

Sauber’s expected departure comes on the heels of the conclusion of special counsel Robert Hur’s probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents. While Hur concluded that criminal charges against the president were not warranted, his more than 300-page report was highly controversial, in no small part because of its many references to the president’s alleged memory problems.

In his role as White House counsel, Sauber emerged as a key White House voice to publicly excoriate Hur’s conclusions.

As Biden’s special counsel, Sauber has also overseen the White House’s legal strategy amid Republican lawmakers’ months-long efforts to impeach the president. That mission appeared to crumble earlier this year, after an ex-FBI informant with ties to Russia was charged with giving false information to the FBI – lies that were at the very foundation of Republicans’ bribery allegations leveled against Biden and his family.

While Sauber had always expected to eventually return to the private sector, both the conclusion of the Hur investigation and the seeming political collapse of the GOP impeachment inquiry into Biden created a natural opening for his exit, a White House official told CNN. The White