Who Really Released the Hur Report?

• infirmity
• imbroglio
• portrayal
• rest with
• congressional grilling
• sticks and stones
• eminently
• contortion
• opprobrium
• embroiled
• intrigue
• woke
• deride
• ponderous
• the statute of limitation
• grossest
• dangled
• riddled with
• pretzeling
• averted
• navel-ward
• acceding
• importuning
• ad hominem
• shrieked
• alluding
• immaculately
• holdover
• memoirs
• mandate
• tad 
• disingenuous
• rampant
• spin it
• tainted
• debacle
•  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who Really Released the Hur Report?

Biden’s attorney general is the man who chose to let voters know about the president’s infirmity.

---

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

March 15, 2024 4:43 pm ET

Listen (5 min)

Special Counsel Robert Hur is sworn in during the House Judiciary Committee hearing about his report on President Biden in Washington, March 12. 

It’s the great unexplored theme in the Robert Hur imbroglio. The decision to release the Hur report, with its portrayal of a confused and forgetful president, wasn’t mandatory and neither did it rest with Mr. Hur, despite the congressional grilling he received this week.

The decision rested with Attorney General Merrick Garland.

He was under no legal obligation to do so. He could have buried Mr. Hur’s findings, redacted them or sent them back for edits. The inevitable sticks and stones from Republicans would have been eminently survivable, especially in light of the contortions the attorney general had already performed for President Biden.

To some neutral observers, he would even have been a hero for restoring the department’s honorable tradition of not disclosing investigative information about people it doesn’t intend to charge.

It’s worth recalling, until now, how much opprobrium Mr. Garland and his department have been willing to bear on Mr. Biden’s behalf.

He let himself be embroiled in a White House intrigue to paint parents as terrorists for doubting the woke agenda in schools. He remained mute while Mr. Biden derided him as a “ponderous judge” for not pushing criminal charges against Donald Trump. His department let the statute of limitations expire on Hunter Biden’s grossest tax behavior. When the spotlight got too hot, it dangled a plea deal that internal whistleblowers and a federal judge found riddled with irregularities.

Mr. Garland has made a specialty of pretzeling the department’s special-counsel rules. He appointed Jack Smith to supply the demanded Trump prosecutions even as he averted his gaze navelward and pretended he was doing anything but acceding to White House importuning.

He pretzeled the rules again in the Hunter Biden matter, instead of appointing the required outsider, choosing an insider who could be trusted to ignore whistleblower allegations of favoritism toward Hunter because he was the insider accused of providing the favoritism.

Mr. Garland’s decision to publish the Hur report came in the face of ad hominem White House leaks as well as back-channel lobbying.

If an unwritten part of the attorney general’s job is to protect the president who appointed him, another part is to recognize when the department has bent too far.

Could a new and unique form of lame-duckness be showing itself, the kind that comes to a president who isn’t expected to serve long if re-elected? Even more so, one who’s seen as ill-serving his party and country by clinging to a possible second term when a majority of his own voters think he’s too old?

Partisan Democrats this week shrieked certainty that Mr. Hur intended the controversy he was bringing into the presidential contest by alluding to Mr. Biden’s infirmity. Shouldn’t they go to the obvious place and ask if Mr. Garland intended it too?

Mr. Garland, as noted in a previous column, presents himself as almost immaculately absent from all controversial decisions, yet he picked Mr. Hur out of private practice and gave him his marching orders, despite Democratic body language trying to suggest to voters Mr. Hur was a Trump holdover or MAGA activist.

Disloyalty? Or loyalty to his country? Maybe in his memoirs Mr. Garland will let us know.

Mr. Garland has enough to repent of. For the third election in a row, the department he now heads will be central to the election fight, having possibly supplied, through its control of the FBI, the decisive factor in 2016 and 2020.

If Mr. Biden had felt more encouragement to step aside due to age, legal problems and lousy polls, a younger Democrat might be on his or her way to a ringing victory and mandate over Mr. Trump,

All of America might have regrets too if an exceptionally close election between two exceptionally unpopular candidates ends up chaotically in the House of Representatives.

After 2020, it was a tad disingenuous to ask ordinary Republicans to distinguish between Mr. Trump’s claims of massive vote fraud and the things that actually did happen, such as late rule changes, rampant media dishonesty, and U.S. intelligence veterans lying to the public about the Hunter Biden laptop.

Now, however you spin it, voters see President Biden trying to put his opponent in jail. For half of America, a Biden victory, fairly or not, will be seen as a tainted victory, a debacle that Mr. Garland’s fingerprints are all over, though not his alone.

He’s right to be embarrassed about the department’s role. He may have deeper reasons than he’d be likely to share for saying “enough.”