White House counsel and President Joe Biden's personal lawyer criticized several of the claims made in special counsel Robert Hur's report, including comments about the president's memory.
White House counsel Richard Sauber and Biden's personal lawyer Bob Bauer wrote a five-page letter to Hur on Monday, saying that raising questions about Biden's memory was “completely superfluous.”
In a later statement, Bauer accused Hur of “excessive investigation” and said he had flouted Justice Department regulations and standards.
“We do not believe the report's treatment of President Biden's memory is accurate or appropriate,” Sauber and Bauer wrote. “The report uses very damaging language to describe a common occurrence among witnesses: the lack of memory of events that occurred years ago.”
In a statement Thursday, Bauer said the special counsel “could not refrain from excessive investigations, which is perhaps not surprising given the intense pressures of the current political environment.”
“Whatever the impact of those pressures on the Final Report, it violates the Department's regulations and standards,” Bauer said. “Very little in this work contributes to a clear and succinct understanding of a simple conclusion: no misconduct occurred, no charges are warranted. The Report delves into a discussion of 'evidence' of 'intentional' retention of classified documents, only to acknowledge that, in fact, there is no case of 'intentional' retention at all.”
A spokesperson for the special counsel's office declined to comment on the alleged “inaccurate and inappropriate comments in the special counsel's report.”
Sauber said in a statement that the report recognizes that “errors in packaging documents at the end of an administration or when members of Congress leave office are, unfortunately, common.”
“We disagree with a number of inaccurate and inappropriate comments in the Special Prosecutor's report,” he said. “However, the most important decision the special counsel made – that charges are not warranted – is firmly based on the facts and evidence.”
