Robert K. Hurr will walk into a Capitol hearing room Tuesday as a uniquely unifying figure in divided Washington — a man despised by Democrats and Republicans alike.
In February, Mr. Hurr, the special counsel investigating President Biden, concluded a year-long investigation into Mr. Biden’s retention of sensitive government documents, finding that the president should not face criminal charges.
But Mr. Hurr, using language that Biden’s team saw as gratuitous, politically damaging and out of his job description, described the octogenarian president as “a nice, well-meaning, old man with a bad memory,” likely to acquitted by any jury.
Mr. Hurr, 51, will face withering questions from both parties when he testifies before the House Judiciary Committee to explain Mr. Biden’s acquittal and the barbed prose in his 345-page report.
Republicans are likely to chastise him for his interactions with Justice Department officials and his legal excuses for not charging Mr. Biden despite finding evidence suggesting he knew some of the material in his possession was classified . Democrats will almost certainly criticize him for making sweeping claims about Mr. Biden’s memory and try to undermine his authority to make such an assessment.
“No one ever said this was going to be easy,” said Rod J. Rosenstein, a former deputy attorney general, who used Mr. Hur as his top aide during a tumultuous period that included the appointment of special counsel Robert S Mueller III. to investigate his boss at the time, President Donald J. Trump.
“He will be asked a lot of difficult questions, but I expect him to limit his answers to the four corners of his report and give truthful answers in that context,” he added.
Mr. Hur will testify as a private individual, not as a Justice Department employee: As of Monday, he had resigned as a special prosecutor and will be represented by a private attorney, William A. Burke, according to a department spokesman, who did not elaborate. Mr. Hur’s reason for doing so.
Mr. Burke, a former deputy White House adviser to George W. Bush, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The political stakes of Tuesday’s hearing, while still high, come days after Mr. Biden offered a fiery defense of his presidency during a State of the Union address that appeared to address some of the concerns on age and mental capacity raised by expert counsel.
“Thirty-two million Americans watched him command during his State of the Union address,” said Anthony Colley, who was a spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland when Mr. Hur was appointed in January 2023. “These people don’t need an interview transcript or testimony from someone they’ve never heard of to answer a question that Biden addressed last week.”
It is not uncommon for witnesses in federal cases to report their faulty memories in interviews with investigators, particularly of events that occurred years earlier. But Mr. Hurr included references to Mr. Biden’s memorial not directly related to the preservation of classified documents — including the president’s struggle to remember the year (2015) when his son Beau died.
Mr. Hurr, a registered Republican who avoided partisan politics during a two-decade career as a prosecutor, was chosen, in part, because of his reputation for calmly handling the pressure of high-profile investigations and the internal politics of the department.
The Hur report highlights the challenges of developing special counsel, a move intended to protect prosecutors from political interference but often results in the release of negative information about people who have been cleared of criminal offenses.
Current and former department officials said Mr. Hur’s uncertain account was probably motivated by self-preservation. He needed to justify his decision not to indict Mr. Biden, they said, when the administration had accused Mr. Trump of handling and retaining government documents — even though the charges against Mr. Trump allege far more serious wrongdoing.
“If the target of a special counsel investigation has no complaints about the investigation, then the investigation is probably a cupcake investigation,” said John P. Fishwick Jr., who served as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia. from 2015 to 2017.
“Mr. Hurr got the mix right, as the Republicans say he was too soft and the Biden team says Hurr took cheap shots,” he said.
