Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a Justice Department special counsel to look into how classified documents ended up at President Joe Biden’s nonprofit think-tank and even his home, setting up a tricky political situation that threatens to muddy the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s mishandling of national security secrets.
At a brief press conference on Thursday, during which he refused to answer any questions, Garland said “extraordinary circumstances here” justify the use of a special investigator who operates with slightly more independence than a typical federal prosecutor.
Garland gave the politically-fraught job to Robert Kyoung Hur, who served as the top federal prosecutor in Maryland for much of the Trump administration and is now in private practice in Washington, D.C. He co-chairs the “crisis management” group at the firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
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Hur did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
Attorney General Merrick Garland and U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch (left) announced the appointment of the special counsel Thursday.
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via GettyThe former prosecutor will lead the Department of Justice’s effort to understand how and why several classified documents ended up at the private institution that Biden started after leaving the White House as President Barack Obama’s vice president in 2017. In November, Biden’s lawyers discovered several classified records were improperly transported to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania but located in the nation’s capital.
The DOJ order made public on Thursday lays out the task ahead of Hur.
“The document authorizes him to investigate whether any person or entity violated the law in this matter,” Garland said during his press conference, in which he touted Hur’s “long and distinguished” record as a prosecutor.
Hur oversaw several national security and public corruption cases when he was the Trump-appointed Maryland’s U.S. attorney from 2018 to 2021. According to an online biography on a state website, Hur served on the state governor’s “gangs and violent criminal networks” council during that time and also led an effort to investigate hate crimes against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hur started his legal career by serving as a court clerk for California Federal Appellate Judge Alex Kozinski, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and hailed by legal scholar Noah Feldman as a “conservative-libertarian stalwart” and “the enfant terrible of judicial conservatism.” Hur went on to clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the staunch conservative who sided against abortion rights in the seminal Roe v. Wade case and ended the Florida electoral recount—effectively putting George W. Bush in the White House in 2000.
Hur is in a powerful yet precarious position, assigned to investigate a growing scandal that could amount to nothing—or create a stain on the Biden administration.
The fact that several classified documents were found improperly stored at a progressive think-tank shows just how irresponsibly national secrets are sometimes handled when a presidential administration exits the White House. However, Republicans are already using this embarrassing episode to draw false equivalencies to the way Trump hoarded nearly 100 classified documents at his oceanside Florida estate of Mar-a-Lago for more than a year—even when the National Archives notified his office that the records were wrongly stored there illegally. It wasn’t until FBI agents raided the mansion in August 2022 that the Trump-held documents were recovered.
By contrast, Biden’s personal lawyers say they “immediately” notified the federal government about their discoveries at both the think tank and Biden’s home garage. Now it’ll be up to Hur and his investigators to figure out how they got there and who screwed up.
On Thursday, Garland said he would “ensure that Mr. Hur receives all the resources he needs to conduct his work.” He insisted that the “normal processes of the department can handle all investigations with integrity,” but said the unique circumstances at play here justified assigning a prosecutor with more leeway.
The concern for Democrats now is that Hur could use the investigation the way a previous DOJ special counsel, Kenneth Starr, turned a narrow inquiry into a wide-ranging probe that eventually led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1999.
DOJ special counsels have a way of developing unforeseen investigative threads of their own and uncovering all sorts of scandals, as the nation saw with the Trump-era investigation by Robert Mueller, who initially explored how the Russian government sought to undermine the 2016 U.S. presidential election but ended up jailing several Trump advisers over their abuse of government roles and lying to the FBI.
