The Hur Report Won't Go Away
The Hur Report Won't Go Away
Biden, the Special Counsel and the US media face uneasy questions
He’s a First Amendment violator who has lied to their faces, but some influential journalists still want to censor themselves, and their colleagues, when it comes to Joe Biden.
The logic — at least from former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan — is that the President’s age, 81-years-old, should not be a strong focus of their election coverage.
“It would be great if he were 20 years younger. His age really is a legitimate concern for many voters. But for the media to make this the overarching issue of the campaign is nothing short of journalistic malpractice,” Sullivan has argued.
It’s a courageous stance. Not least because many journalists will be wincing at the idea of Donald Trump returning to White House and some may even be quietly rooting for Biden. At least Sullivan is being honest about her own position.
But her plea to temper it down on the old Commander-in-Chief doesn’t stack up. Outside of economic concerns, ‘the government/poor leadership’ is the top issue for Americans. And that is something that the report from Special Counsel Robert Hur has put into full focus.
The lie
Though many outlets concentrated on Hur’s commentary about Biden’s mental state, which the White House and the President’s official and personal lawyers have pushed back on, they didn’t focus on Biden’s lie in relation to his handling of classified information as a private citizen.
In a press conference following the publication of the report, he made this very precise and unscripted claim to reporters and the US public: “I did not share classified information [with my ghostwriter]...I guarantee you I did not.”
Now, though the Hur investigation lasted around a year, with 173 interviews of 147 witnesses, it can really be boiled down to two men, one silver laptop and a load of transcripts.
The other man who was investigated in relation to a potential breach of the Espionage Act was Mark Zwonitzer, who worked on two memoirs for Biden, 2007's “Promises to Keep” and 2017’s “Promise Me, Dad”.
It is the latter book that landed both Biden and Zwonitzer in hot water. In researching it, the Hur investigation found that Biden had read to Zwonitzer from his Vice Presidential notebooks, sometimes “nearly word-for-word”, when the writer visited his rented home in Virginia in February and April 2017 (Biden had left office on 20 January 2017).
This included classified information and accounts of Situation Room meetings as well as briefings from the CIA, the Department of Defense and foreign policy officials, the Hur team revealed.
At one point on 24 April 2017 Biden even showed Zwonitzer one of his notebooks:
“Mr. Biden read aloud from notes summarizing a range of issues relating to a foreign terrorist organization, including specific activities of the U.S. military and views expressed by the intelligence community, including the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director.
“While reading these notes, Mr. Biden struggled to read his handwriting, and he showed part of the handwritten passage to Zwonitzer. The two then had the following exchange:
Mr. Biden: Do you have any idea what the hell I'm saying there? Less on the number of what? Isn't that awful?
Zwonitzer: Something. Number, something - quality. I can't.
Mr. Biden: Some of this may be classified, so be careful.
Zwonitzer: Okay.
Mr. Biden: I'm not sure. It isn't marked classified, but.”
The Hur team were able to find this evidence after Zwonitzer voluntarily handed over transcripts and later his laptop and disk drive to the FBI.
The writer had previously deleted the audio files of the interviews, partly because he was worried that his devices could be hacked, so the Hur team had to extract some of the audio files, others were corrupted in the process.
Notably, in their punchy reply to Hur’s report (page 384), Richard Sauber, Special Counsel to the President, and Bob Bauer, Personal Counsel to Biden, did not seek to counter or push-back against the account of the readings to Zwonitzer.
And, in of themselves, a lay reading of the US’ vague and arguably outdated Espionage Act would have it that Biden didn’t seek to damage his country by sharing this information. Instead he was trying to provide important context information, as he saw it, relating to his personal policy positions on foreign affairs and defence.
But that doesn’t get away from the fact that Biden has now lied on camera to the US public about the incident. And it is probably only to get worse for the President as Hur has been asked to testify before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee on 12 March.
Hopefully this hearing, and other public scrutiny, will help answer more questions that arise from Hur’s report, some of which I have outlined below.
The unanswered questions
Timeline and interviews
The President’s official written statement and other comments around the report stress that he was voluntarily interviewed on 8 October and 9 October 2023, “even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7th and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis”.
The interviews lasted five hours. These facts are not explicitly mentioned in Hur’s report. In fact, Hur doesn’t provide any broad timeline of his investigation.
But even though Biden and the White House are making much of this, they fail to mention or address the claims that interview negotiations allegedly began sometime in July between the parties.
“Attorneys for President Joe Biden and the special counsel appointed to investigate his handling of classified documents have been negotiating for about a month over the terms under which he would be interviewed, two people familiar with the matter said,” NBC reported on 11 August.
Why did Team Biden decide to go ahead with the October interviews? Could they have been moved?
The Hur leak
One of the major outcomes of the report — that Biden wouldn’t be charged but would face “harsh criticism” — was leaked to The Wall Street Journal.
“The prosecutor investigating why classified documents ended up at President Biden’s home and former office is preparing a report that is expected to be sharply critical of how he and his long-time aides handled the material, but the probe isn’t likely to result in a criminal case, according to people familiar with the matter,” a 16 November report read.
Who was behind this leak and what was their motive?
Memory claims and recordings
Though the media has made much of Hur’s claim that Biden’s memory was “significantly limited” during his team’s interview with the President, the report states this is also related to the recorded interviews with Zwonitzer in 2017.
Will Hur be able to properly define “significantly limited” and will redacted recordings of the tapes be made available to the US public, even through a presumably lengthy freedom of information request process?
Here’s what Biden’s lawyers said on the matter:
“The President's inability to recall dates or details of events that happened years ago is neither surprising nor unusual, especially given that many questions asked him to recall the particulars of staff work to pack. ship, and store materials and furniture in the course of moves between residences.
The same predictable memory loss occurred with other witnesses in this investigation. Yet unlike your treatment of President Biden, your report accepts other witnesses' memory loss as completely understandable given the passage of time.”
Beau Biden
It is still not clear why the investigators asked Biden when his son passed away or the context of this exchange, with the Special Counsel claiming that he struggled to remember the date (30 May 2015).
We know from the Hur report that pictures of Beau campaigning were found alongside some classified Afghanistan material in Biden’s Delaware garage and “Promise Me, Dad” partly focused on the passing of the President’s son.
More clarity is needed around this inflammatory claim.
Secure locations and classified documents
The fact that secret materials were left in a damaged and open box by synthetic firewood and a broken lamp seems to have flown under the radar, owing to the other claims in Hur’s report.
But the investigation does show the messy nature of Biden’s documents, which go all the way back to 1973 when he became a Senator and was privy to some classified information.
Secret documents were found at the University of Delaware, his home and garage in Delaware and at The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at The University of Pennsylvania.
The Hur report crucially concludes on this matter that: “...the evidence suggests that Mr. Biden did not wilfully retain these documents and that they could plausibly have been brought to these locations by mistake.”
But the whole episode does raise questions about how the White House and the Senate maintains strong information hygiene practices and why Biden’s documents weren’t fully vetted by the likes of the US National Archives when he stood down as Vice President.
How many more open boxes with the US’ secrets are sitting in suburban garages across the country?
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For high-praise, tips or gripes, please contact the editor at iansilvera@gmail.com or via @ianjsilvera. Follow on LinkedIn here.
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