Hur To Defend Report's Assessment Of Biden's 'poor' Memory In Opening Remarks

Special counsel Robert Hur will resolutely defend his assessment of President Joe Biden’s memory when he testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday morning, a draft of his opening remarks shows.

“My assessment in the report about the relevance of the President’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair,” Hur writes in his opening remarks, which were first reported by Playbook. “Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe. I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the President unfairly.”

Hur’s report, which concluded last month that he would not bring criminal charges against Biden for his handling of classified material, depicted the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

The report drew immediate backlash from Democrats and from Biden himself, particularly over Hur’s mention that Biden did not remember when his son Beau died. “I don’t need anyone, anyone, to remind me when he passed away,” Biden said of the special counsel at the time. “How the hell dare he raise that.”

But Hur insists in his opening testimony that “The evidence and the President himself put his memory squarely at issue” and that he “took the same approach when I compared the evidence regarding President Biden to the Department’s allegations against former President Trump.”

Hur also defends his conclusion that criminal charges were not warranted because their investigation did not “identify evidence that rose to the level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”