EXCLUSIVE — Robert Hur will appear before Congress next month to testify on his special counsel report, which found President Joe Biden may have “willfully” retained classified documents from his time as vice president and senator.
Hur will appear for a hearing with the House Judiciary Committee on March 12, according to a source with direct knowledge of the plans.
The news of Hur’s testimony comes after he concluded a yearlong investigation into how classified documents ended up at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware.
Hur found, according to the detailed report the Department of Justice made public last week, that Biden stored classified documents, including material about U.S. policy in Afghanistan, in those locations and that he may have done so intentionally. Willfully retaining classified material in unauthorized locations is against the law.
Hur, however, decided against prosecuting Biden, saying he did not believe he could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the president’s actions were willful.
Hur also made stunning and repeated observations in his report that Biden’s memory was sorely lacking and that a jury could be convinced that the 81-year-old president had made an innocent mistake, another reason Hur gave for declining prosecution.
Hur said Biden and his legal team were proactively cooperative — a key difference between Biden’s case and a similar case involving former President Donald Trump, Hur noted. Trump is facing charges for allegedly storing national defense information and then obstructing federal investigators working on his case.
Republicans on the committee are expected to press Hur on why he did not pursue charges against Biden, as many of them have already leveled public accusations of double standards at the DOJ over the matter.
In addition to Hur’s testimony, the Judiciary, Ways and Means, and Oversight committees have asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to provide them by Monday with the transcript and any other records, such as video or audio recordings, of the interview Hur conducted with Biden in October.
GOP lawmakers have said they want to understand whether Biden’s attorneys had narrowed the scope of the interview at all. Records of the interview would also shed light on the memory problems Hur cited in the report, which the White House and Biden’s attorneys have criticized as gratuitous and against DOJ policy.
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Hur’s testimony follows a pattern of special counsels appearing before Congress at the conclusion of their investigations. Robert Mueller, who investigated Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, appeared before the Judiciary and Intelligence committees in 2019. Similarly, John Durham testified in the House last year after uncovering FBI missteps in the Trump-Russia investigation.
Special counsel David Weiss, who is prosecuting Hunter Biden, testified in a closed-door interview with lawmakers last year despite the fact that his investigation into the first son remains open. The Department of Justice highlighted at the time that his testimony during an open investigation was unprecedented but that the DOJ wanted to allow Weiss to address prolific public narratives about Weiss’s work.
