Wise words — but a change in tone from the Schiff who, at a March 12 congressional hearing, condemned a witness as a disingenuous partisan for suggesting Biden might have age-related memory trouble.
“You must have understood the impact of your decision to go beyond the specifics of a particular document to go to the very general, to your own personal prejudicial, subjective opinion of the president,” Schiff lectured. “One you knew would be amplified by his political opponent. When you knew that would influence a political campaign. You had to understand that and you did it anyway.”
The witness was Robert K. Hur, the special counsel whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to investigate Biden’s retention of classified documents after leaving the vice presidency in 2017. Hur, a registered but not particularly partisan Republican, had decided against prosecuting Biden. But Schiff and other Democrats on the panel were out to discredit him over his explanation of why he made that call. As Hur put it in a report to Garland, he believed — after interviews in which Biden rambled and struggled to recall facts and events — that jurors would have reasonable doubt regarding the criminal intent of “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Now, the 81-year-old Biden’s reelection campaign is in crisis over his stumbling performance in the debate with former president Trump, and it’s obvious that Hur’s report was precisely the sort of honest account from an objective outsider that Schiff is now recommending.
However the current disaster ultimately plays out, it’s worth revisiting the Hur episode as a key chapter in what appears to be a concerted effort by the White House and its political allies to deflect legitimate questions regarding the president’s fitness for office.
Basically, Hur was subjected to a campaign of vilification.
It began even before Garland released Hur’s report on Feb. 8. “A global and pejorative judgment on the President’s powers of recollection in general is uncalled for and unfounded,” Biden’s lawyers wrote Garland Feb. 7.
An angry President Biden used mild profanity at a hastily called news conference the night the report came out, declaring his memory “fine,” and denouncing Hur for asking him when his son Beau had died — though later transcripts showed the president had misremembered an exchange in which he actually raised that subject.
Vice President Harris chimed in on Feb. 9: “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated. And so I will say that when it comes to the role and responsibility of a prosecutor in a situation like that, we should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.”
There followed high-minded social media posts and media commentary attacking Hur’s judgment, heavily salted with words such as “gratuitous,” “inappropriate” and “unprofessional.” The heretic-stoning culminated at the aforementioned March 12 hearing, called by the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican majority, ironically, to flay Hur for not pressing charges against Biden.
Sinking below even Harris’s slam on Hur’s “integrity,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) accused him of “doing everything you can do to get President Trump reelected so that you can get appointed as a federal judge or perhaps to another position in the Department of Justice. Isn’t that correct?” Hur, credibly, denied it.
Perhaps if Democrats had not met Hur’s report with such an outpouring of denial, but treated it as a warning, they might not be in such a predicament today. Certainly this judicious and professional lawyer would have been spared an assault on his reputation.
To be sure, there are legitimate questions as to whether Hur’s report laid it on a bit thicker than Justice Department regulations suggest, because in such a high-profile case the attorney general was bound to release what was technically a confidential document.
Nevertheless, it’s clear the only partisan hit job here was the one waged by Hur’s critics.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is fighting a House subpoena for the audio recordings of Hur’s interviews with Biden, citing executive privilege and the need to protect Justice Department processes. Opponents of release argue — plausibly — that publicly available transcripts contain all the relevant information, and that the lower chamber’s Republican majority is just out to exploit the audio politically.
Events since June 27 have altered the balance. If the president and his team are as confident of his fitness as they say, they should stop objecting to disclosure. They might as well give transparency a try; wagon-circling has failed.
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