Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to release it was a foregone conclusion — and anything short of publicizing the full report would have been worse.
Technically, the report from special counsel Robert Hur on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents is considered confidential under DOJ rules. Hur even labeled it as such.
In practice, though, burying or censoring the report would have been untenable... informed by previous politically sensitive investigations: Special counsel reports have always been made public in recent years, and Garland would have been slammed by Republicans and the press if he tried to keep this one under wraps. Hur, meanwhile, clearly understood that political reality, so the harsh language he included was exactly what he expected the public to see.
The result on Thursday was a public 345-page document, bearing the Justice Department’s imprimatur, that described the president as embarrassingly, and perhaps dangerously, forgetful. Hur’s allies say he needed to include the details about Biden’s mental state because such judgments are critical to decisions about whether to prosecute for these sorts of crimes.
... said former Attorney General Bill Barr, referring to the decision to release Hur’s report. “Can you really draw the line and say, ‘I’m not going to put this out,’ without having people even more suspicious? That’s almost as bad as letting it out. At that point, your options are very limited.”
“Rob Hur didn’t issue a public report,” Rosenstein said. “He wrote a confidential internal memo. Attorney General Garland made the decision to release it.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/09/garland-decision-release-hur-report-00140806
And Garland also released the transcript of Hur's interview with Biden, but refused congressional Republicans' subpoena of the audio version of that transcript.
So those who say Garland will make some excuse about "norms," forget that he has already set the norms.
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