Special Counsel Expected Heat for Biden Inquiry. His Report Sparked a Political Inferno.

WASHINGTON—Robert Hur, the special counsel behind a withering report detailing President Biden’s sloppy handling of classified documents, always expected blowback, friends and former colleagues say.

It has been particularly intense.

A bipartisan chorus is accusing Hur, a former Justice Department official during the Trump administration, of trying to skew the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. Republicans allege a double standard over Hur’s finding that charges weren’t warranted against Biden, as former President Donald Trump faces felony charges related to his own handling of classified material at his Florida estate. Democrats say Hur’s portrayal of Biden as a doddering old man dealt the president a political blow that feels intentional.

Some current and former law-enforcement officials came to Hur’s defense, saying a painfully detailed report was necessary to explain his team’s decision that charges weren’t justified.

The special counsel “is statutorily required to provide a report to the department and the American people thoroughly detailing what he deems to be the facts, and Hur did that,” said Jay Town, a former Trump-appointed U.S. attorney.

Still others said the tone, at times patronizing and disdainful, went beyond a reasoned explanation of his decision and strayed into the kind of criticism one would expect from a political opponent.

Hur’s 345-page report “contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions,” said former Attorney General Eric Holder, who served during the Obama administration. Another former federal prosecutor, Mimi Rocah, said: “Once Hur said ‘the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,’ he should have stopped.”

Hur, 50 years old, previously had a front-row seat to the reputational damage that comes with being a special counsel. As the top aide to former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, he helped oversee Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 election. The inquiry, which was highly critical of Trump’s conduct but also didn’t yield criminal charges, left Mueller, a former FBI director and U.S. Marine, with little support across the political spectrum.

Hur appears to be joining that lonely club. Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday said Hur’s characterization of the president’s demeanor “could not be more wrong” and was politically motivated, while Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said the Justice Department was allowing Biden to live above the law.

Appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in early 2023, Hur viewed the job as one he couldn’t refuse. Associates joked he was a glutton for punishment.

He came to the task with a reputation for being by-the-book and even-keeled. Garland praised his long legal career, which included a stint during the George W. Bush administration as an adviser to Christopher Wray, who was then leading the Justice Department’s criminal division and is now the director of the FBI.

After his unanimous Senate confirmation in 2018 to become the top federal prosecutor in Maryland, Hur led politically sensitive public-corruption cases and prosecutions involving charges of unlawful retention of classified records.

To become special counsel, Hur left the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and what promised to be a lucrative client in the National Football League, which had turned to him to defend against a lawsuit brought by the Washington, D.C., attorney general.

Hur’s small team of prosecutors included some from the Maryland U.S. attorney’s office he used to lead, and a former top federal prosecutor in Iowa. They worked largely under the radar during the yearlong probe.

Their quiet efforts burst into view Thursday when Garland made Hur’s report public, fueling a firestorm that Hur’s allies said he didn’t deserve but could have seen coming.

“For Rob this is not about politics, this is a principled decision,” Rosenstein said. “He went through a rigorous process, and his conclusion that an indictment was not warranted is well-defended.”

Rosenstein and other former prosecutors said the report reads similarly to other internal Justice Department memos that prosecutors write to justify decisions not to bring charges. Hur, they said, was anticipating possible defenses Biden could raise that would make him a sympathetic defendant who jurors might believe had simply forgotten he still had the documents.

Such memos are usually kept out of public view. But if a special counsel chooses not to pursue charges, he is required to disclose why a target’s missteps, however problematic, weren’t criminal. Garland had promised to make Hur’s report public when he appointed him, saying he wouldn’t interfere with the probe. He could have made redactions or edits, but didn’t.

A spokesman for Hur declined to comment. Garland made no public statement on the findings, but said in a letter to Congress that Hur had never proposed an investigative step he found inappropriate.

Hur’s work isn’t quite finished. He will likely have to testify before Congress about his findings, thrusting him further into the political firestorm.

Write to Sadie Gurman at [email protected] and C. Ryan Barber at [email protected]