Biden lawyer calls special counsel Hur’s report ‘off the rails’

Vivek Ramaswamy, a right-wing businessman who launched a doomed presidential primary and has since become a mainstay on conservative media, has claimed that Democrats will run Michelle Obama instead of Joe Biden in November.

Mr Ramaswamy made the claims during a Fox News appaearance.

According to Mr Ramaswamy, Democrats want to use a report issued by special counsel Robert Hur concerning Mr Biden’s possession of classified government documents following his vice presidency as a way to justify the replacement.

Mr Hur’s report claims charges won’t be brought against Mr Biden in part because he will be viewed as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” by a jury.

Mr Ramaswamy said the natural backup pick for replacing Mr Biden is Vice President Kamala Harris, but he claims due to her poor primary performance in 2020 they instead will opt for Ms Obama.

“If race and gender are your basis for selecting someone for a job, and the identity of your party is tied to that temple of identity politics, then they will risk looking hypocritical if they sideline her after they sideline Biden. And I do think Michelle Obama offers them a convenient path out of that problem, somebody who checks the boxes that they need to have checked per their own ideology, while also selecting an alternative to Biden that they may view as more palatable in a general election . . . it’s looking increasingly like it’s not going to be Biden as the nominee. And I think that it should not be shocking to see someone like Michelle Obama take the role of the nomination,” he said.

There is no evidence that Democrats are planning on running anyone other than Mr Biden in November.

President Biden will soon name a high-level task force to recommend procedures that will prevent classified materials from being mishandled or inadvertantly lost during presidential transitions in the future, White House spokesperson Ian Sams said on Friday.

Mr Sams, who serves as a spokesperson for the White House Counsel’s Office, was addressing reporters at the daily White House press briefing following the release of a report from Special Counsel Robert Hur in which Mr Hur, a Republican who served in the Trump administration, assailed Mr Biden’s memory while declining to charge him with any crime stemming from the discovery of classified materials at his Wilmington, Delaware home.

He told reporters that the National Archives has found that the misfiling of classified materials during transitions has been a common occurrence which Mr Biden believes should be fixed.

Andrew Feinberg reports:

An angry and animated President Joe Biden on Thursday hit back at a Republican prosecutor’s claim that his memory is faulty in last-minute remarks to reporters on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, the Department of Justice released a report by Special Counsel Robert Hur, the former Maryland US Attorney who Attorney General Merrick Garland charged with probing how classified documents ended up at Mr Biden’s home in Delaware and former office in Washington.

Mr Hur did not recommend that Mr Biden face criminal charges, citing what he described as significant “mitigating factors” which led him to state that charges were not warranted and would not have been warranted even if Mr Biden were not president and barred from being prosecuted by Department of Justice policy.

Andrew Feinberg filed this report from Washington, DC:

How it began: President Joe Biden was urgently seeking more money from Congress to aid Ukraine and Israel. He took a gamble by seizing on GOP demands to simultaneously address one of his biggest political liabilities — illegal migration at the U.S.-Mexico border.

How it ended: Biden came close to succeeding, before it all fell apart spectacularly. Now the president is trying to make the best of it after a major congressional deal was scuttled once Republican front-runner Donald Trump got involved. And Biden is intent on showing that the former president and his “Make America Great Again” Republican acolytes in Congress aren’t really interested in solutions.

In between: There is a story of a president willing to anger his own party’s activist class in an election year, rare hope for bipartisan progress on one of the third rails of American politics, and a sudden, stunning collapse publicly engineered by Trump that Biden’s team now sees as a political gift.

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President Joe Biden “wilfully” held on to classified materials that were discovered at his home in Delaware and the office of a think tank in Washington DC, but should not face criminal charges for doing so, a special prosecutor appointed by the attorney general found in a report released on Thursday.

The special counsel, former Trump appointee and ex-Maryland US Attorney Robert Hur, did not recommend that Mr Biden face criminal charges, citing what he described as significant “mitigating factors” which led him to state that charges were not warranted and would not have been warranted even if Mr Biden were not president and barred from being prosecuted by Department of Justice policy.

John Bowden reports from Washington, DC:

An angry and animated President Joe Biden on Thursday hit back at a Republican prosecutor’s claim that his memory is faulty in last-minute remarks to reporters on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, the Department of Justice released a report by Special Counsel Robert Hur, the former Maryland US Attorney who Attorney General Merrick Garland charged with probing how classified documents ended up at Mr Biden’s home in Delaware and former office in Washington.

Mr Hur did not recommend that Mr Biden face criminal charges, citing what he described as significant “mitigating factors” which led him to state that charges were not warranted and would not have been warranted even if Mr Biden were not president and barred from being prosecuted by Department of Justice policy.

Andrew Feinberg filed this report from Washington, DC:

Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday came out swinging with a full-throated defence of President Joe Biden in the wake of an unflattering report on his conduct by a Republican special prosecutor.

Ms Harris was speaking in the Indian Treaty Room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at an event hosted by the White House’s gun violence prevention office when she addressed the matter of Mr Hur’s report, which critics have assailed as including gratuitous attacks on the president even as it announced that he will not face any criminal charges stemming from the discovery of classified documents at his Delaware home.

She said she has been “privileged and proud to serve as vice president of the United States” under Mr Biden, and said Mr Hur’s remarks on Mr Biden’s age and memory were “gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate”.

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