Hur Defends His Findings as Political Knives Come Out
Republicans pepper Robert K. Hur about his justifications for not charging the president in the classified documents investigation. Democrats criticize him for making broad assertions about Mr. Biden’s memory.
Robert K. Hur, the former special counsel who investigated President Biden’s possession of classified documents after he left the vice presidency, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Republicans grilled Mr. Hur about his conclusion that the evidence was insufficient to charge Mr. Biden with a crime. Democrats, for their part, attacked him for disparaging remarks in his report about Mr. Biden’s mental acuity — including calling him a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who had “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
Here are five takeaways:
Hur was attacked by both sides.
Members of both parties were unhappy with aspects of Mr. Hur’s report. Republicans were upset that Mr. Biden was not charged with a crime, repeatedly noting the criminal indictment against former President Donald J. Trump that accuses him of willfully retaining sensitive national security documents. Democrats accused Mr. Hur of smearing Mr. Biden’s mental acuity, saying it violated Justice Department policies.
At times the comments grew harsh.
Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia, accused Mr. Hur of deliberately providing fodder to “play into the Republicans’ narrative that the president is unfit for office because he is senile.” That casting was false, he said, pointing to Mr. Biden’s energetic delivery of the State of the Union address.
Getting Mr. Hur, a former Trump political appointee, to acknowledge that he is a registered Republican, Mr. Johnson accused him of “doing everything you can do to get President Trump re-elected so that you can get appointed as a federal judge or perhaps to another position in the Department of Justice.”
Mr. Hur countered that he had “no such aspirations.” He insisted, “Partisan politics had no place whatsoever in my work, it had no place in the investigative steps that I took, it had no place in the decision that I made, and it had no place in a single word of my report.”
On the other side of the aisle, Representative Tom Tiffany, Republican of Wisconsin, accused Mr. Hur of protecting Mr. Biden as part of what he portrayed as a politicized double standard by the Justice Department in whom it charges with crimes.
“I want to thank you for the work you did as far as you could, but unfortunately, you are part of the Praetorian Guard that guards the swamp out here in Washington, D.C., protecting the elites — and Joe Biden is part of that company of the elites,” Mr. Tiffany said.
Attempts to score political points dominated the hearing.
The hearing rarely focused on gaps in the evidence Mr. Hur gathered apart from Mr. Biden’s mental state. Instead, Republicans sought to portray Mr. Biden as a criminal who has escaped charges solely because he is, in the words of Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, a “senile cooperator” and “the elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top.”
Mr. Hur, who has been under fire for including what some have described as disparaging comments about Mr. Biden’s memory, had an incentive to focus on how Mr. Biden’s mental state might come across to a jury as relevant and proper to discuss.
Democrats often focused on how Mr. Trump’s retention of classified documents was worse; Mr. Trump was criminally charged. That included contrasting Mr. Biden’s cooperation with Mr. Trump’s attempts to obstruct efforts to retrieve files he was keeping at his Florida club and residence, Mar-a-Lago. And on several occasions, they played video clips of Mr. Trump misremembering things or speaking in garbled fashion.
There was less discussion of why the facts Mr. Hur found fell short of proof that Mr. Biden knew he had any particular classified document, regardless of his memory.
Still, at several points, Democrats like Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania induced Mr. Hur to agree that his report also included lines like, “In addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute.”
‘I did not exonerate him.’
Moments after Mr. Hur’s report became public last month, Mr. Biden’s allies quickly sought to characterize it as an exoneration of the president. By their telling, the fact that Mr. Hur failed to find evidence sufficient to charge the president with a crime meant Mr. Biden was innocent.
But Mr. Hur did find some evidence consistent with a conclusion that Mr. Biden had willfully retained classified documents — even though he also concluded that the available facts fell short of proof. Against that backdrop, five words during a back-and-forth with Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat, may complicate Democrats’ message as the 2024 campaign moves forward.
After asserting that Mr. Hur exonerated the president, Ms. Jayapal tried to move on with her comments. But Mr. Hur interjected, saying, “I did not ‘exonerate’ him — that word does not appear in the report.” He repeated that several more times, under questioning from members of both parties.
The discussion offered an echo of an ambiguous and much-scrutinized line in the 2019 report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Unlike Mr. Hur, Mr. Mueller made no decision on whether Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime, only writing, “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” of obstruction of justice.
Hur let lawmakers say things he disagreed with.
Throughout the hearing Mr. Hur generally sat stone-faced and — except when defending himself personally — rarely raised objections to members of Congress as they questioned him, even when their assertions contradicted what he said or wrote.
For example, as Republicans like Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey used their time to portray Mr. Biden’s and Mr. Trump’s improper possession of classified documents as equivalent, Mr. Hur did not speak up and repeat what he wrote in his report: that there are “several material distinctions” between the two cases, and the allegations against Mr. Trump “present serious aggravating facts” not present in Mr. Biden’s situation.
And late in the hearing, Mr. Hur did not respond when a Democratic congresswoman, Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, declared that “you were able to fully and totally exonerate him of any criminal wrongdoing.”
The hearing seemed likely to reverberate in the coming campaign.
Some of the most intense exchanges focused on the president’s age and cognitive abilities, and they are likely to reverberate during the next eight months of the 2024 presidential campaign as Mr. Biden faces a rematch with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest person elected president, has been dogged for months by concerns about his age among voters from both parties. He and his allies have rejected those concerns, but Mr. Hur’s report described memory problems during a five-hour interview.
On Tuesday, Republicans repeatedly sought to draw Mr. Hur into exchanges about the president’s state of mind, but he refused to go further than the words in his report. And Democrats angrily challenged Mr. Hur’s assertion that he was not being political: “You were not born yesterday,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California. “You understood exactly what you were doing. It was a choice.”
Inside the West Wing, the political damage has already been done by Mr. Hur’s report. And Tuesday’s hearing may do little other than amplify it — a reality that Republicans were clearly aware of when they invited him to testify.
For the president’s adversaries, Mr. Hur’s denial that he exonerated Mr. Biden may also be political gold. It’s not hard to imagine that the moment will appear in political television ads supporting Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Democrats will try to focus on Mr. Hur’s conclusion that no charges should be filed, and to draw a sharp contrast between the charges that were filed against Mr. Trump for his own handling of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021.
Jordan says the committee will break shortly to take votes on the House floor and then return to finish up questioning of Hur.
Three-quarters of all registered voters said President Biden was too old to be an effective president, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. And nearly half of all voters went a step further to say that he was not just ineffective, but that his age was such a problem that he was not capable of handling the job of president.
The survey was conducted before Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address last week, which got high marks from voters in early polls.
(This candidate) is just too old to be an effective president.
Among all registered voters:
Strongly
agree
Somewhat
agree
Somewhat
disagree
Strongly
disagree
Don’t know/
refused
21%
21%
23%
32%
Trump
77 years old
2%
47%
26%
14%
11%
Biden
81 years old
2%
(This candidate) is just too old to be
an effective president.
Among all registered voters:
Trump, 77 years old
Strongly
agree
Somewhat
agree
Somewhat
disagree
Strongly
disagree
21%
21%
23%
32%
Don’t know/
refused 2%
Biden, 81
47%
26%
14%
11%
2%
House Republicans have solid backing from their own party as they wade into Tuesday’s hearing. More than 80 percent of all Republicans in the most recent Times/Siena poll said they thought Mr. Biden was too old to be an effective president. The vast majority in that group said he was not capable of handling the job of president.
Large majorities across every age, race, gender and educational attainment said they thought Mr. Biden was too old to be effective. Even a majority of Democrats shared this concern.
One piece of potentially good news for Mr. Biden: Most Democrats who said Mr. Biden was too old still said they thought he was able to handle the demands of the job.
Mr. Biden’s age has remained a potential political liability for the president. In his own party, voters are split on whether Mr. Biden should remain the party’s nominee. In July of last year, when a slightly higher share of voters wanted to replace Mr. Biden as the party’s nominee, the main reason voters gave for not wanting Mr. Biden on the ticket was his age.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTJordan, the Republican Judiciary Committee chairman, suggests the hearing could wrap up before 1:40 p.m. votes in the House.
Reporting from Washington
In January 2023, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate President Biden’s handling of classified documents to avoid any perception that he was protecting his boss entering an election year.
The man Mr. Garland tapped for the job, Robert K. Hur, has not been quite as cautious.
Last month, Mr. Hur, 50, a former Justice Department official in the Trump administration, dropped a 345-page political bomb into the middle of the 2024 campaign, the final report summing up his investigation. The document, written in unvarnished prose, is an excruciatingly detailed and seemingly subjective assessment of Mr. Biden’s faulty memory that overshadowed his conclusion: Mr. Biden, unlike former President Donald J. Trump, should not face criminal charges.
The Hur report underlines the challenges of deploying special counsels, which are intended to shield prosecutors from political meddling, but often result in the release of negative information about high-profile targets who have been cleared of criminal wrongdoing. It also showed the complicated balance of the job — navigating a polarized environment that leaves little option but to expansively explain the rationale for any decision.
Mr. Hur’s critics say he broke through guardrails intended to avoid tarnishing politicians facing tough elections. That was perhaps best exemplified by the F.B.I. director James B. Comey’s public condemnation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of government secrets, delivered in the months before the 2016 election.
Among the thousands of sentences in the Hur report, one juts out like a dagger: “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” he writes.
It is not unusual for witnesses in federal cases to cite their faulty recollections, particularly about events occurring years earlier, in interviews with investigators. But Mr. Hur included references to Mr. Biden’s memory that did not relate directly to retention of classified documents — including the president’s struggle to recall the year (2015) when his son Beau died, a shattering event in his life.
Those revelations, immediately seized upon by Trump supporters, were seemingly at odds with the purview of Mr. Hur’s job as special counsel, according to critics.
“Special Counsel Hur report on Biden classified documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions,” Eric H. Holder Jr., President Barack Obama’s attorney general, wrote on social media, reflecting a widening sense that the disclosure inflicted political damage on the president.
Anthony Coley, Mr. Garland’s spokesman when Mr. Hur was appointed, said the focus on Mr. Biden’s memory crossed a line.
“He was supposed to be an umpire calling balls and strikes,” said Mr. Coley, who interacted with Mr. Hur at the department. “But the editorializing — the excessive, unnecessary commentary about an uncharged individual — felt like political potshots.”
A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment.
Current and former department officials said Mr. Hur’s narrative was probably motivated by self-preservation. He needed to justify his decision not to charge Mr. Biden when the government had indicted Mr. Trump for similar, albeit far more serious, transgressions, they said. (Mr. Hur said Mr. Biden shared the content of his handwritten notebooks, which contained references to classified material, with his ghostwriter.)
Representative Tom Tiffany, Republican of Wisconsin, accuses Hur of being part of a “praetorian guard” that protects “the swamp” and “elites.” Neither side is happy with Hur or his report.
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Representative Jayapal went on to get Hur to address explanations for why there was insufficient evidence to prove Biden willfully retained classified documents apart from memory issues. He confirms that lines like “In addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute” are in his report.
If there was one moment so far that will make Biden and his team cringe, it may be the one served up by Representative Pramila Jayapal, when she claimed Hur had exonerated Biden. His retort — "I did not exonerate him" — will be used repeatedly by Republicans and Trump. That’s not helpful to Biden.
The political dynamics of the hearing are basic, and binary. Democrats are defending their candidate by trying to debunk the memory issue, while Republicans are framing the Hur report as proof Trump didn’t do anything worthy of an indictment in his own classified documents case.
You can tell you are entering the third hour of a committee hearing when half the members’ seats are empty.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIf there is one performance so far that the White House likely appreciates, it’s the one by Representative Adam Schiff. The deeply held belief inside the West Wing is that Hur was over the top — and purposeful — in using language that questions the president’s cognitive capacity. Schiff’s decision to press that case against Hur was most likely cheered on by the president’s allies.
Adam Schiff gets to the heart of the Democratic criticism of Hur: Why did he choose “a general pejorative” description of Biden’s mental state rather than “the specifics” of inconsistencies of Biden’s statements?
transcript
“You could have written — you could have written your report with his, with comments about his specific recollection as to documents or a set of documents. But you chose a general pejorative reference to the president. You understood when you made that decision, didn’t you, Mr. Hur, that you would ignite a political firestorm with that language, didn’t you?” “Congressman, politics played no part whatsoever in my investigative steps —” “You understood nevertheless, didn’t you, Mr. Hur, you cannot tell me you’re so naive as to think your words would not have created a political firestorm. You understood that, didn’t you, when you wrote those words, when you decided to include those words, when you decided to go beyond specific references to documents? You understood how they would be manipulated by, by my colleagues here on the G.O.P. side of the aisle and by President Trump. You understood that, did you not?”
Hur fires back at Schiff: “You are suggesting I shape, sanitize” my report for political purposes.
As Republicans like Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey use their questioning of Hur to portray Biden’s and Trump’s actions as equivalent in order to disparage the charges against Trump, Hur could respond by repeating what he wrote in his report, that there are clearly “several material distinctions” between the two cases, and the allegations against Trump, if proved, “present serious aggravating facts” unlike the evidence involving Biden. It is notable Hur is choosing not to speak up.
Reporting from the Capitol
House Republicans for months have been trying to dig up dirt on President Biden, mostly by focusing on the international business dealings of his son Hunter.
But that investigation has not, to date, produced the kind of bombshell revelations Republicans had hoped could fuel his impeachment in the House and help swing the 2024 election to former President Donald J. Trump, who faces 91 felony counts in four separate criminal cases.
Today, Republicans are trying another tactic: highlighting questions about the president’s handling of classified documents and stoking concern about his age and memory.
As Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Mr. Biden’s retention of documents and decided he had not committed a prosecutable offense, appears before the House Judiciary Committee, he is speaking to top Republican investigators who are hoping to portray Mr. Biden as just as legally and ethically troubled as Mr. Trump — and so elderly and confused as to be unfit for the presidency.
Seated at the center of the dais questioning Mr. Hur are two of the men leading the impeachment investigation: Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and James Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the Oversight and Reform Committee.
Even though Mr. Hur’s report cleared Mr. Biden, Republicans plan to focus much attention on a line from the report in which the special counsel described at least one reason there could be reasonable doubt regarding Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents.
“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,” Mr. Hur wrote.
That has given Republicans one of their strongest political openings to date.
One Republican, Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, has already introduced a resolution calling on Vice President Kamala Harris and Mr. Biden’s cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
“The Hur report officially addressed what many Americans have long witnessed with their own eyes — that President Biden is no longer fit to successfully discharge the critical duties of his office,” Mr. Buck said.
Democrats, well aware of the political opportunity for Republicans, have set up a rapid response line of attack against the G.O.P. arguments. They plan to condemn Mr. Hur’s comments about Mr. Biden’s memory as “gratuitous,” and have produced a montage of Mr. Trump’s own cognitive failing.
They also are using every opportunity to remind the public that it is Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, who has actually been charged with criminally mishandling classified documents.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThat is the first time Hur got angry. Hank Johnson suggests Hur “smeared” Biden — he shoots back to say he has no partisan motivations and no aspirations to serve in a future Republican administration.
transcript
“Despite clearing President Biden from being prosecuted, you used your report to trash and smear President Biden because he said in response in response to questions over a five-hour interview that he didn’t recall how he got the documents. And you knew that that would play into the Republicans’ narrative that the president is unfit for office because he’s senile. And the American people saw during the State of the Union address that that was not true. But yet that’s what you tried to offer to them and that’s why they are having you here today so that they can expand upon that narrative. And you knew that that’s what was going to happen, didn’t you?” “Congressman, I reject the suggestion you have just made. That is not what happened.” “Let me move on.” “Partisan politics.” “You are a member — you are, you are a member of the Federalist Society, are you not?” “And fair —” “Are you a member of the Federalist Society?” “I am not a member of the Federalist Society.” “But you are a Republican, though, aren’t you?” “I am a registered Republican.” “Yes, sir. And you’re doing everything you can do to get President Trump re-elected so that you can get appointed as a federal judge or perhaps to another position in the Department of Justice. Isn’t that correct?” “Congressman, I have no such aspirations, I can assure you. And I can tell you that partisan politics had no place whatsoever in my work. It had no place in the investigative steps that I took. It had no place in the decision that I made, and it had no place in a single word of my report.”
Republicans are omitting two key facts when they suggest Biden’s retention of a few documents is comparable to Trump’s behavior. First, Trump retained many more files. Second, Trump is accused of obstructing the investigation — while Hur said Biden cooperated fully.
Ninety minutes into the hearing, Hur is calmly navigating the choppy waters between the two parties. But his responses appear to show an undercurrent of disapproval of Biden’s actions — and an unwillingness to offer the president much more than a fairly narrow legal exoneration.
One emerging pattern is that the hearing is not focusing on weaknesses in the evidence Hur gathered apart from Biden’s mental state. Republicans want to portray Biden as a criminal who is escaping charges only because he is, as Representative Matt Gaetz’s words, “senile.” Hur, who has been accused of violating Justice Department policies and standards for including gratuitous disparaging comments in his report about Biden’s memory, has his own incentive to focus on how Biden’s mental state might come across to a jury as relevant and proper to discuss. Democrats, meanwhile, are focusing on the ways Donald Trump’s hoarding of classified documents, for which he faces charges, was worse.
As a result, so far there is little discussion of why the facts Hur found fell short of proof that Biden knew he had any particular classified document – regardless of memory. Hur was unable to ascertain what Biden had been talking about in the tape about finding “classified stuff” in a Virginia house, and wrote that the only documents that were chargeable as unauthorized retention were a set of Afghanistan war files found in a box, with a jumble of unrelated stuff, in the garage of Biden’s Delaware house. But Hur was unable to figure out who packed those documents and how they ended up in the garage.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTKey moment: Hur says Attorney General Garland did not pressure him to make changes to his report or request any changes.
transcript
“It makes, really, a perfect case. You did your job. Mr. Garland did his job. And unlike Mr. Barr, he didn’t interfere. Did Mr. Garland ask you to change your report at all?” “He did not, sir.” “Didn’t redact a thing?” “No, sir.” “Like Mr. Barr did, he redacted everything and made the Mueller report look like 180 degrees different than what it was. Mr. Garland did right and you did right. And I commend each of you.”
The exchange between Matt Gaetz and Hur underscores why Biden’s aides believe his post-report news conference was not helpful to him. The president was angry that night and made several statements in response to reporter questions. Gaetz called the answers “lies,” though Hur would say only that the president’s statements were “inconsistent” with the evidence his team discovered.
Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, accuses Hur of letting Biden slide for his handling of classified documents under what he calls the “senile cooperator theory.” He says he agrees that Biden shouldn’t have been charged, but argues Trump too should not be charged for mishandling classified documents. Gaetz himself has been investigated by the Justice Department over whether he violated sex trafficking laws. Ultimately no charges were brought.
Matt Gaetz tries to get Hur to say that Biden has lied publicly about his handing of documents. The most Hur will say is Biden’s remarks are “inconsistent” with his findings.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTHur makes a significant factual mistake — saying Dana Remus was President Obama’s White House counsel. She was President Biden’s.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, accuses Republicans of appointing themselves “amateur memory detectives” as they try to use this hearing to attack President Biden for electorate gain
There’s a (knowing) irony in the grilling by Republicans of Hur. They accuse Biden of being prideful and egotistic in his decision to retain classified information — perhaps not wanting to highlight the ego and pride demonstrated by their own candidate for president.
That was a significant moment: Jim Jordan accuses Biden of holding onto secrets to make money off his book and burnish his political image — and Hur says he agrees with that “assessment.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTFor President Biden, the hearing on Capitol Hill will be a mixed political blessing: an opportunity for his allies to remind voters of his exoneration, but a chance for his adversaries to call attention to his age and health.
The president would like to focus on the first. In their responses since Mr. Hur’s report was released to the public, White House advisers have stressed the contrast with former President Donald J. Trump’s own case involving classified documents.
Mr. Trump was charged with 40 counts of criminal activity related to documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, including unauthorized retention of national security secrets and obstruction of efforts by the government to retrieve the files. Mr. Biden was not charged.
End of story, the president’s aides say.
But on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Republicans will try to focus on a different story: Mr. Hur’s conclusion that he could not bring charges against Mr. Biden because he would come across to a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who had “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
They are also sure to grill Mr. Hur on his decision not to charge Mr. Biden at all, which they argue is evidence of a double standard by the Justice Department.
The observations by the special prosecutor about Mr. Biden’s age enraged the president and his loyalists. Just hours after the report, Mr. Biden held a brief news conference at which he was defensive and angry, lashing out at Mr. Hur, especially about the claim that he had forgotten when his son, Beau Biden, died of brain cancer.
“How the hell dare he raise that,” Mr. Biden said. “I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.”
The president’s allies concluded the news conference was a mistake. Rather than underscore the news that he was not charged, it cemented the claims about his age and memory in the view of those who saw it.
Republicans, who invited Mr. Hur to testify on Tuesday, are hoping the hearing does the same thing, and will likely try to redirect questioning toward Mr. Hur’s concerns about the president’s memory.
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Glenn Thrush, Adam Goldman and
WASHINGTON — Robert K. Hur, appointed last year to oversee the investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified documents, has two attributes that suited the task — years of prosecutorial experience and a vivid understanding of the perils inherent in high-wire special counsel investigations.
Mr. Hur, 51, was President Donald J. Trump’s pick to run the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland, where he earned bipartisan praise for his handling of violent crime and public corruption cases. But it was his 11-month stint as the top aide to the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein — as Mr. Rosenstein oversaw the appointment of a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to investigate Mr. Trump’s dealings with Russia — that might have been the most critical.
Mr. Hur helped run the day-to-day operations of the department at a time of major tumult in the department: From mid-2017 to late 2018, Mr. Rosenstein was under relentless political pressure, under threat of being fired by Mr. Trump over his decision to appoint Mr. Mueller, which the president considered a personal betrayal.
“We were coming under tremendous criticism from the commentators — and the president — and Rob kept his head down, pushed ahead and never lost his sense of humor,” Mr. Rosenstein said in an interview after Mr. Hur’s appointment was announced.
“This is a very different task than anything he’s done before,” Mr. Rosenstein said at the time, adding that he thought Mr. Hur was the ideal pick. “Every special counsel starts with a sterling reputation, but no one finishes up that way.”
But Mr. Hur’s crucible moment came later, after he left Mr. Rosenstein’s staff to become the top prosecutor in Maryland.
Geoffrey S. Berman, the Trump-era U.S. attorney in Manhattan, wrote about Mr. Hur in his memoir, “Holding the Line,” which accuses the Justice Department under Mr. Trump of trying to use prosecutors in Manhattan to support Mr. Trump politically and pursue his critics. According to Mr. Berman, the Justice Department pushed his office to investigate John F. Kerry, the secretary of state in the Obama administration, who had angered Mr. Trump by trying to preserve the nuclear deal he had negotiated with Iran.
After Mr. Berman’s office decided not to bring criminal charges against Mr. Kerry, he wrote, Attorney General William P. Barr reassigned the matter to Mr. Hur, who called Mr. Berman to ask about it. “I went through the whole thing, explained our reasons for declining, and urged Hur to do the same,” Mr. Berman wrote.
Mr. Hur came to “the same conclusion we did, and the Kerry investigation just quietly died — as it should have,” he added.
That was not an aberration, officials said. Mr. Hur made a point of ensuring that politics did not affect his office.