Legal analysts on Thursday were stunned by special counsel
Robert Hur’s decision to release a
report attacking President
Joe Biden’s
age and memory while also clearing him in the classified documents case.
Speaking on
MSNBC, former federal prosecutor
Andrew Weissmanncalled Hur’s commentary “entirely inappropriate,” “irrelevant,” and “gratuitous.”
“It is also exactly what you’re not supposed to do, which is putting your thumb on the scale that could have political repercussions,” said Weissmann, who noted that the Justice Department’s lingo is “put up or shut up.”
He said, “You either decide to go forward, that there is proof here, or you don’t say anything at all with respect to your opinions about the case.”
Weissmann said former
FBI Director
James Comey also flunked this test when he announced before the 2020 election that he would not charge
Hillary Clinton but then attacked her anyway.
“The appropriate thing to do there is to just say ‘we’re declining, there’s insufficient proof,’” he said. “It is not a time to have a press conference to state, ‘Oh, by the way, let me give you my personal views.’”
Former acting Solicitor General
Neal Katyal agreed, saying he wrote the current special counsel regulations, which say there shouldn’t be a public report at the end and certainly not with “a list of adjectives.”
“I’m not aware of anything quite like this, in which you’ve got a special counsel going after the sitting president for being too old and having a faulty memory,” he added. “As Andrew said, ‘totally gratuitous.’”
Andrew Weissmann said Robert Hur’s report was “exactly what you’re not supposed to do.”
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