Special Counsel Robert Hur is standing by his report on President Biden’s handling of classified documents, maintaining he did not unfairly characterize his mental health.
Hur — who is expected to testify Tuesday in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill at 10 a.m. — will push back against accusations of politicizing the report by commenting on Biden’s failing memory.
“My assessment in the report about the relevance of the President’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair,” Hur wrote in a copy of the prepared remarks obtained by Fox News. “Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe.”
SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT HUR TO TESTIFY PUBLICLY ON FINDINGS FROM BIDEN CLASSIFIED RECORDS PROBE
Attorney for the District of Maryland Robert Hur delivers remarks at the Robert F. Kennedy Main Justice Building in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The remarks continued, “I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the President unfairly. I explained to the Attorney General my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do.”
Hur, who released his report to the public in February, did not recommend criminal charges against Biden for mishandling and retaining classified documents and stated that he wouldn’t bring charges against Biden even if he were not in the Oval Office.
Those records included classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and other countries, among other records related to national security and foreign policy, which Hur said implicated “sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”
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Hur did not recommend any charges against the president but did describe him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” — a description that has raised significant concerns for Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign.
Democratic lawmakers and part leaders sharply criticized the inclusion of comments about the president’s mental capabilities, saying it unnecessarily politicized the investigation.
“I analyzed the evidence as prosecutors routinely do: by assessing its strengths and weaknesses, including by anticipating the ways in which the President’s defense lawyers might poke holes in the government’s case if there were a trial and seek to persuade jurors that the government could not prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” Hur claimed in the prepared remarks.
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President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign rally at Pullman Yards in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
He added, “There has been a lot of attention paid to language in the report about the President’s memory, so let me say a few words about that. My task was to determine whether the President retained or disclosed national defense information “willfully”—meaning, knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids. I could not make that determination without assessing the President’s state of mind.”
Fox News’ Tyler Olson and David Spunt contributed to this report.