Hur Began Job With Promise of Impartiality, a Deep Resume

When he was named special counsel last year, Robert Hur brought deep experience and the promise of dispassionate fairness to the classified documents investigation. "I will conduct the assigned investigation with fair, impartial, and dispassionate judgment," said Hur, a registered Republican. Now that it's over, President Biden and his supporters say Hur fell short of that promise, after years as a federal prosecutor and senior official in the Justice Department. To take the special counsel job, per Forbes, Hur had to drop a new client: the NFL. He was to defend the league, Commissioner Roger Goodell, and former team owner Dan Snyder in a lawsuit over their response to sexual harassment accusations.

Hur's background includes Harvard and Stanford educations and a clerkship for then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the Washington Post reports. He served years as a federal prosecutor in Maryland. He worked at Justice Department headquarters, where he was at one time a special assistant to Christopher Wray, who later became FBI director. Then-President Donald Trump picked him to lead the US attorney's office in Maryland. One of his prosecutions involved a former National Security Agency contractor who eventually pleaded guilty to stealing classified government material, the largest such theft at the time. Two years ago, Hur left government and joined a DC law firm, which welcomed his "decades of experience in government and in private practice."

When naming him special counsel, Attorney General Merrick Garland also touted Hur's "long and distinguished career as a prosecutor." Hur said then he'd "follow the facts," per Barron's. Special counsels aren't under regular supervision by the Justice Department but report to the attorney general and can be asked to explain their actions, per the Post. At the end of the investigation, the rules require a special counsel to provide a report to the attorney general. It's up to, in this case, Garland to decide how much of the report will be released. All of it was, including the now-infamous assessments of Biden's memory. The report "contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing traditions" of the Justice Department, said former Attorney General Eric Holder, per NBC News. (More special counsel stories.)