He exonerated Joe Biden for the affair of the top secret papers found in his office and at his home, thus defusing a dangerous mine on the way to re-election, but Robert Hur triggered a potentially more dangerous one by describing in his report Joe Biden as “an elderly man , with memory problems”.
Going so far as to link the lack of criminal prosecution to these “significant limitations” of the 81-year-old president's memory: it would be difficult, he wrote in the report, “to convince a jury to convict a former president well beyond 80 years of a serious crime that requires a mental premeditation”.
Appointed chief federal prosecutor of Maryland by Donald Trump in 2017, a post he held until Biden's inauguration in 2021, Hur was chosen for this very reason by Attorney General Merrick Garland as a special prosecutor to manage the investigation into the secret papers of Biden, confident that he would follow it “impartially and urgently”.
“I intend to follow the facts quickly and exhaustively, without fear or favor, and I will honor the trust that has been placed in me,” the prosecutor declared when he was entrusted with the investigation in January 2023. In recent months, Hur has conducted 173 interviews of 147 witnesses, including Biden who, as the president himself announced, made himself available for 5 hours between 8 and 9 October, immediately after the Hamas attacks in Israel on 7 October.
Before being named Maryland's top prosecutor, Hur was the principal assistant to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rostein, following a decade-long career as a federal prosecutor in national security and corruption cases, including working alongside Christopher Wray before he became head of the FBI. In this role he participated in the review of then special prosecutor Robert Mueller's report on Russiagate.
A graduate of Harvard and Stanford Law School, Hur began his career in the office of former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a Ronald Reagan appointee. Prior to his appointment as special prosecutor, Hur, who is of Korean descent, was appointed by the governor of Maryland to lead a working group to address violence against Asian Americans.
#Robert #Hur #prosecutor #Biden #trouble #exonerated
