NBC News EXCLUSIVE: “Biden attacked Hur for asking him when Beau died. That didn’t happen, sources say.“
President Joe Biden lashed out at Robert Hur last week over one particular line in the special counsel’s report on his handling of classified documents: that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden told reporters in an impromptu White House press conference. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
But Hur never asked that question, according to two people familiar with Hur’s five-hour interview with the president over two days last October. It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden’s death, they said.
Biden raised his son’s death after being asked about his workflow at a Virginia rental home from 2016 to 2018, the sources said, when a ghost writer was helping him write a memoir about losing Beau to brain cancer in 2015. Investigators had a 2017 recording showing that Biden had told the ghost writer he had found “classified stuff” in that home, the report says.
Biden began trying to recall that period by discussing what else was happening in his life, and it was at that point in the interview that he appeared confused about when Beau died, the sources said. Biden got the date — May 30 — correct, but not the year.
Hur’s 345-page report absolved Biden of criminal wrongdoing while pointing to evidence that he took home and kept highly classified material. Even though Biden was found to have disclosed classified information to the ghost writer on three occasions, prosecutors concluded that they could not prove that the president knew it was classified information at the time.
Fiery criticism of the report from Biden supporters, though, has focused on Hur’s characterizations of the president’s memory. They say the report was filled with gratuitous details about Biden’s memory issues, including that the president misremembered the year Beau died. They have also seized on Biden’s statement that the special counsel asked him about the date of Beau’s death.
“Why in the hell are you asking that question?” former Attorney General Eric Holder, a Democrat, said Monday on MSNBC, suggesting that Hur was “a rube, perhaps,” who had “shaded” what he put in the report. “What does that have to do with the retention of classified documents?”
First lady Jill Biden questioned in a fundraising letter whether Hur was using “our son’s death to score political points.”
Sources familiar with Biden’s view of the interview say Hur induced the president to bring up his son by asking a series of personal questions related to Beau. They included questions about Biden’s memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” in which he writes about his son’s battle with cancer and death in 2015. Hur also asked about Biden’s work for the Biden Cancer Initiative, founded in Beau’s memory.
These sources did not dispute that it was Biden, not Hur, who first mentioned a date for Beau’s death. But they said Biden felt betrayed by the comments in Hur’s report about his memory and mental state. During the interview, Hur asked him to recall events years in the past as best he could, and Biden agreed to speak freely and expansively, rather than in the clipped and careful manner of a typical witness.
Exactly what Biden said about his son’s death and other issues may ultimately become public. The two-day interview was audio-recorded and transcribed, and congressional committees are expected to push for its release.
That sheds a different light on the situation. I think it’s still reasonable for Biden to be angry that the report gave the impression that he doesn’t remember when his son died. But the context here makes Hur’s inclusion of that factoid more obviously relevant: the whole conversation revolved around disclosures of classified material—the subject under investigation—to the ghostwriter, who was presumably neither cleared to receive such material nor possessed of a need to know.
As Steven and I have both noted—and several regular commenters have corroborated—it’s frankly not that unusual for even someone considerably younger than Biden to get mixed up on dates on occasion. But Hur was clearly trying to depict a pattern of such lapses.
Many have pointed to partisan motivations for this, and that’s certainly a reasonable possibility. Hur’s defenders offer a different one:
Two people who know Hur well said that he had set out to write a balanced and thorough narrative that would explain why, despite significant evidence, he had concluded that no criminal charges would be warranted for Biden. Over the course of a yearlong investigation, Hur’s team examined 7 million documents and spoke with 147 witnesses, according to his report.
Associates of Hur say that Biden‘s claim that the special counsel quizzed the president, unprompted, about his son’s death from cancer is an effort to take the focus off the special counsel’s findings regarding how Biden handled classified documents and his struggle to recall certain facts.
The line of questioning about the memoir was directly relevant to the central issue of the investigation, the people familiar with the interview said. Hur’s team had learned that Biden was recorded in 2017 telling the ghost writer that he “found all the classified stuff downstairs,” at the Virginia rental home where the two were working on the book.
In the interview, Biden told Hur that he didn’t remember saying in 2017 that he had found classified documents in the home.
Hur’s investigation determined that the documents Biden mentioned in 2017 were never turned over to the FBI and, in fact, were likely the same ones found in Biden’s Delaware garage in 2022.
Biden’s struggle to recall the period when he worked with the ghost writer were among several exchanges during the two-day interview where he appeared to forget important facts, according to the report. Hur’s report also states that Biden’s memory appeared to be significantly limited in the 30 hours of recorded interviews he conducted with the ghost writer in 2017.
Hur stated that those memory lapses were one reason he concluded that it would be difficult to convince a jury to convict Biden of intentionally mishandling classified information.
Comparisons with former FBI Director James Comey’s damning remarks when he declined to prosecute former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have rightly been made. The focus has been on the divergence from DOJ protocol and the damaging effect that they had on Democratic presidential candidates.
But it’s also true that both Comey and Hurr had pressure in the opposite direction. The failure to prosecute high-level officials for violations that would land underlings in serious legal jeopardy is, after all, fraught.
But Hur has come under criticism for his descriptions of what he viewed as Biden’s “diminished facilities.” Holder said on X that there were too many “gratuitous remarks” in Hur’s report that were “flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland has also been criticized by Democrats for releasing the full, unredacted version of the report. Special counsel rules require them to write confidential reports to the attorney general detailing and explaining their decisions on whether to file criminal charges in a case.
In an effort at transparency, Garland has pledged to make all special counsel reports public, consistent with the Justice Department track record of releasing most special counsel reports since the office came into being in 1999.
William Barr, who was attorney general in the Trump administration, was harshly criticized for initially releasing his own two-page summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia report in 2018. Several weeks later, Barr released the full document.
People familiar with the matter say Garland first saw Hur’s report Feb. 5, three days before its release. Had the attorney general ordered any changes, he would have had to disclose those to Congress, as required by the special counsel regulations.
In a letter to Congress when he released the report, Garland said that he took no action to block any investigative steps by Hur, because nothing the special counsel did was “so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.”
I both understand why Democrats are furious at Garland’s decision and why he would make it. Again, it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Had he followed Barr’s lead and issued a redacted report, the news cycle immediately afterward would have been considerably more favorable to Biden. But Congressional Republicans would have made the full report public and then, not only would Hur’s observations about Biden’s mental state gone viral, anyway, but DOJ’s reputation as a nonpartisan actor would have taken another hit.
NBC News legal contributor Chuck Rosenberg says it’s fair to question some of the language Hur used about Biden’s memory in his report, but not his decision to explore and explain Biden’s memory issues.
“If Hur was going to tell the attorney general that he declined to prosecute President Biden, then I believe he was also obligated to explain his rationale,” Rosenberg wrote for the website Lawfare.
“Would Biden come across as forgetful? As sympathetic? As willful? As dissembling? As honest? These are crucial determinations prosecutors make all the time about witnesses and defendants,” he added. “Indeed, I cannot imagine writing a report to the attorney general and not including these assessments.”
People who know Hur say he did not anticipate how his descriptions of the president’s memory would resonate across the political landscape. They say he believed that when his report was released, he would likely come under immediate attack from Republicans who would accuse him of going soft on Biden.
Instead, one line in Hur’s 345-page report will likely live on in American presidential and political history: the special counsel’s assessment that Biden would come across to jurors as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Again, shades of Comey.
