The White House on Tuesday said special counsel Robert Hur’s testimony before Congress absolved President Biden of any wrongdoing in handling classified documents, just hours after Mr. Hur insisted his investigation did not exonerate the president.
“After all this time, the millions of pages of records that have been reviewed; 150 witnesses have been interviewed. The conclusion was there is simply no case here. Case closed. It’s time to move on,” said White House spokesperson Ian Sams.
Mr. Sams’s characterization of Mr. Hur’s testimony and the report he released last month detailing his investigation into Mr. Biden’s handling of classified records differ from what the special counsel told lawmakers earlier Tuesday.
“I did not exonerate him,” Mr. Hur said in congressional testimony. “That word does not appear in my report.”
Still, Mr. Sams insisted that because Mr. Hur did not bring any charges against the president, the investigation should be viewed as a total vindication.
“In America, we do have the presumption of innocence,” Mr. Sams told reporters. “When a prosecutor spent 15 months investigating the case only to determine that there is no case here and that there will be no charges and the case is closed, it only affirms the innocence of the president.”
Mr. Sams also went on the attack against Mr. Hur, suggesting that the prosecutor, who was named U.S. Attorney for Maryland by President Trump, was politically motivated when he mentioned Mr. Biden’s hazy memory in his report.
“I think today laid bare the special counsel, who was a Trump appointee, made some inappropriate comments that do not match up with the transcript,” Mr. Sams said,
Mr. Hur wrote that the president couldn’t recall in an interview with prosecutors when his son, Beau, died of cancer. The transcript shows that a White House lawyer interrupted the president to say that Beau died in 2015 to which Mr. Biden responded, “Was it 2015 he had died?”
“The transcript makes it very clear, and I think the American people understand this, the president remembers exactly when his son died. He carries that emotional toll with him every day,” Mr. Sams said.
Pressed on whether the White House would release the audio or video of Mr. Biden’s two-day October interview with the special counsel, Mr. Sams said he didn’t see the point.
“There’s really no reason that anyone would need the audio tape,” he said. “We have a transcript that’s been made public. The point of an audio recording is to form a transcript and that’s the official record of the proceeding.”
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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