If you want to go deep on the Hur Report to see just how incredibly disingenuous his novelistic little hit job really is, nobody does it better than Emptywheel. Highly recommend, particularly if you’re interested in Hur’s shoddy legal reasoning.
I thought I would share a good thumbnail version from twitter if you don’t have the time or inclination to dig into the details:
So I went through and read Hur’s report, and the way the media at large has been presenting things is borderline malpractice.
Please take the two minutes it requires to read this tweet because it really does matter.
Let me lay it out for you. Hur is alleging there are two counts of Biden willfully retaining classified documents: The Afghanistan docs that were found in his Delaware home and his own personal notebooks.
During an interview with a ghostwriter, he made reference to classified documents that were “downstairs” in his rented Virginia home.
The supposition is that these are the Afghanistan documents that were later moved to his Delaware home in 2019 and then found by the FBI.
Hur indicates that in order to convict Biden of willfully retaining classified documents, the prosecution would have to prove that 1. These are the same documents and 2. That Biden remembers that single sentence from 2017.
It’s against this backdrop Hur says:
When Mr. Biden told his ghostwriter about finding ”all the classified stuff downstairs,” his tone was matter-of-fact. For a person who had viewed classified documents nearly every day for eight years as vice president, including regularly in his home, finding classified documents at home less than a month after leaving office could have been an unremarkable and forgettable event.
Notably, the classified Afghanistan documents did not come up again in Mr. Biden’s dozens of hours of recorded conversations with the ghostwriter, or in his book. And the place where the Afghanistan documents were eventually found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware garage-in a badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus-suggests the documents might have been forgotten.
In addition. Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully-that is, with intent to break the law-as the statute requires.
Another viable defense is that Mr. Biden might not have retained the classified Afghanistan documents in his Virginia home at all. They could have been stored, by mistake and without his knowledge, at his Delaware home since the time he was vice president, as were other classified documents recovered during our investigation. This would rebut charges that he willfully retained the documents in Virginia.
Given Mr. Biden’s limited precision and recall during his interviews with his ghostwriter and with our office, jurors may hesitate to place too much evidentiary weight on a single eight-word utterance to his ghostwriter about finding classified 5 documents in Virginia, in the absence of other, more direct evidence. We searched for such additional evidence and found it wanting. In particular, no witness, photo, email, text message, or any other evidence conclusively places the Afghanistan documents at the Virginia home in 2017.
In other words, the totality of the case on the Afghanistan documents would come down to whether he remembered a single un-noteworthy sentence he spoke seven years ago that may or may not have referred to the Afghanistan documents.
The Hur says:
We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.
That’s the entire context. Do you remember every sentence you spoke in 2017? I sure as hell don’t.
Oh, and regarding the notebooks. There is no controversy over whether Biden knew he had those. He had handwritten notes with classified information on them.
However, Biden claims that they are personal and points to Reagan (who did the same thing) as a historic precedent.
Note it was Biden who made this argument, not his lawyers. (In fact, he made this argument to his lawyers.) Hur declined to prosecute this on the grounds that Biden is probably right.
Not bad for a dude with dementia.
Also, one other thing you won’t see on Fox is that Hur goes through an entire section explaining why Trump’s case is prosecutable but Biden’s isn’t.
Here’s what he said about that:
…Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts.
Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview. and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.
The link to the report. justice.gov/storage/report…
For more reading, I refer you to @emptywheel who did a much more thorough job than I.
Robert Hur’s Box-Checking – emptywheelBefore Robert Hur confessed that jurors who “are unwilling to read too much into Mr. Biden’s brief aside” that Hur quoted out of context would never vote to convict Joe BIden, Hur went to ridiculous l…https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/02/09/robert-hurs-box-checking/
All the media cared about was Hur’s character assassination because they are lazy, delayed adolescents when it comes to this stuff and they easily succumb to a “Lord of the Flies” mentality, which the right understands very well and knows exactly how to tickle their lizrd brains.