Special counsel's report on classified documents has echoes of the 2016 election

An investigation in the middle of a presidential campaign wraps up with no charges, and yet the words of the investigator hurt far more than they help. That is a scenario that appears to be playing out this week with special counsel Robert Hur deciding President Biden shouldn't be charged with willfully retaining classified documents, while also including language in his report about Biden's at-times-faulty memory, aggravating a preexisting political challenge for Biden.

For people who were involved with Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 presidential campaign, the echoes of then-FBI Director James Comey's press conference on July 5, 2016, are hard to miss.

He spoke for 12 minutes, describing Clinton as, among other things, "extremely careless" before getting to what he was there to announce.

"Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case," Comey said of the FBI's investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state.

On its face, it looked like good news for Clinton, but Jennifer Palmieri, who was the campaign's communications director, said it was probably the single most damaging day of the campaign.

"The ad hominem attacks against her were ... brutal," Palmieri recalled.

She said the campaign was blindsided by the Comey press conference and that "irredeemable damage" was done to Clinton's election bid.

In his report, special counsel Hur said he didn't have the evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Biden willfully retained classified documents. But the nearly 400-page report didn't stop there. It also described apparent memory lapses during his interviews with the president. And it included a sentence that immediately ricocheted around the political