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OPINION

Hur’s testimony was another blow to the Justice Department’s reputation

Former special counsel Robert Hur made it a lot harder for Americans to know who or what to trust.

Department of Justice former special counsel Robert Hur listened to a question from Representative Adam Schiff of California during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, March 12, in Washington, D.C.Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

Perception is reality. After congressional testimony on Tuesday by former special counsel Robert Hur about his decision to not charge President Biden for allegedly mishandling classified materials, the reality is that the Justice Department’s reputation has been shredded.

Hur didn’t create this problem. But he exacerbated it by following the less-than-illustrious lead of folks like former FBI director James Comey, former attorney general Bill Barr, and former special counsel John Durham. Instead of sticking to the facts, he — as they did — stuck his foot in it. And in the process, he made it a lot harder for Americans to know who or what to trust.

Hur’s report, which he released in February, became a political lightning rod. It wasn’t for his conclusion that Biden shouldn’t be prosecuted for allegedly removing classified documents from the White House but for Hur’s description of the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

As expected, former president and presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and other Republicans seized on that statement, and jittery Democrats and never-Trumpers started floating scenarios of swapping Biden for some other candidate, as if the presidential race were some fantasy football game.

Also predictably, Hur’s appearance Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee quickly descended into a political theater for performative outrage displayed from both sides of the aisle.

Frankly, Hur never really had a chance of being perceived as an impartial arbiter. Whatever his report stated, it would have been used — even twisted and misused — for partisan purposes. But Hur made such partisan fruit a lot easier to pick.

“Joe Biden had 8 million reasons to break the rules,” declared committee chair Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, claiming that Biden gave classified documents to a ghostwriter to secure an $8 million book deal — a charge Biden denies but Hur’s report gives just enough fodder for.

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Democratic Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia assailed Hur’s motives.

“You’re doing everything you can do to get [former] president Trump reelected so that you can get appointed as a federal judge or perhaps to another position in the Department of Justice, isn’t that correct?”

Hur took umbrage with the classification, justifiably so. As gratuitous as the swipes Hur took at Biden’s age and mental capacity were, if he really were such a brazen political agent, he would have just recommended that Biden be charged.

But Hur certainly didn’t do himself or the Justice Department’s reputation any favors.

Just before his testimony, a transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden — the one from which Hur made judgments about Biden’s memory and age — was made public. That interview, by the way, was conducted just days after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led massacre in Israel. To say Biden had a lot on his mind would be putting it mildly.

Despite Hur’s statement in the report that “Biden’s memory was significantly limited,” during the interview, Hur complimented Biden’s “photographic understanding and recall” of his Wilmington house. Hur wrote in the report that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” but according to the interview transcript, Biden said himself at one point: “What month did Beau die? Oh God, May 30.”

While I don’t know Hur’s motivation for describing the president as some bumbling dinosaur, I certainly agree with Democratic Representative Adam Schiff of California, who called Hur’s description “pejorative.”

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“You cannot tell me you are so naive as to think your words would not have created a political firestorm,” Schiff said.

“The regulations require me to write a confidential report explaining my decision to the attorney general,” Hur said. But Schiff rightly rejected that explanation as too cute by half: Hur admitted that he knew Attorney General Merrick Garland had vowed to release the report publicly. And he must have known those words would be, as Schiff said, “amplified by [Biden’s] political opponents.”

“You had to understand that,” Schiff said. “And you did it anyway.”

The broader problem is that Hur’s lack of circumspection has become the rule for special prosecutors and other Justice Department investigators, not the exception. Comey planted those seeds when he smeared then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on the eve of the 2016 election, despite his decision not to prosecute her for allegedly mishandling classified documents. Barr sowed those seeds when he mischaracterized and withheld information about former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference in 2019. And Durham harvested the crop by concluding his Trump-spurred investigation of the investigators in the Mueller probe with a claim that the FBI engaged in “confirmation bias” but discovered no actual finding of any wrongdoing.

My biggest worry is that these self-inflicted injuries to the Justice Department’s credibility will do damage to the important special counsel probe of our time — Jack Smith’s investigation and prosecution of Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Or that they already have. And that damage cannot easily be undone.

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Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a columnist for the Globe. She may be reached at kimberly.atkinsstohr@globe.com. Follow her @KimberlyEAtkins.