An attorney for President Biden went after special counsel Robert Hur on Sunday, accusing the former federal prosecutor of producing a “shoddy work product” in the report that cleared Biden of wrongdoing for keeping classified documents.
Hur said Biden came off as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in interviews for the investigation, a characterization Biden has aggressively denied.
Attorney Bob Bauer said Hur’s report “went off the rails,” including personal attacks on Biden that were born of political intention and not judicial investigation.
“The investigation could have been concluded in two or three months. It went on for over 15 months,” Bauer said in a CBS “Face the Nation” interview Sunday. “And so along with a legal conclusion comes this flood of characterizations, factual misstatements, pejorative comments about the President that are inconsistent with [Department of Justice] policy and norms.”
“And that, as you see over the last 48 hours, have been widely criticized by legal experts,” he continued. “This is not what prosecutors do. It is [a] shoddy work product.”
Biden’s legal team derided Hur’s characterizations of the president as “inflammatory,” asking Hur to “revisit” and “revise” the language. Bauer said those requests were not heeded in the final report.
While the report clears Biden of any criminal wrongdoing, it affirms that the president did keep classified information from his time as vice president in his home and office. The comments on Biden’s mental acuity and behavior — which Bauer dubbed “totally inappropriate” — have raised questions among some Biden supporters about Hur’s reliability.
Hur is a former U.S. attorney for Maryland appointed by President Trump in 2018. He resigned when Biden came into office, which is standard for federal prosecutors.
Bauer, who was present when Biden was interviewed by Hur, said the president gave his “best recollection” of events, as asked, and did not show signs of any mental deficiency.
“[Biden] engaged, he answered the questions, and the special counsel’s decision to cherry-pick, in a very misleading way, some of the references that you’re discussing here, is an example of what I call a really shabby work product and completely out of bounds for a prosecutor,” Bauer said.
He also alleged that Hur included the personal digs at Biden as part of a political attack on the president, given that the investigation’s result did not find Biden at fault.
“What I was concerned about in the course of this investigation is that we had a special counsel who had one eye on the foregone legal conclusions, and one eye on the inevitable storm from members of his own party, would he [have] to conclude that the president had not broken the law,” Bauer said.
“So you have to wonder with those pressures impinging on the investigation from the outside, knowing the attacks the Republicans had levied on the law enforcement process — did he decide we would have to ask that he would reach the only legal conclusion possible, and then tossing the rest of it to placate a certain political constituency?” he continued.
Biden’s age and memory have been front and center in his 2024 reelection campaign. Biden and his campaign have denied any problems, though the president has made a series of gaffes in recent days, including mixing up the leaders of France and Germany and misstating Egypt as Mexico during a press conference.