The question now will be whether Congress has the will to navigate special treatment for the White House to finish the play.
Hur was tasked with uncovering whether Biden wrongfully held classified material while serving as vice president or as a private citizen.
Citing Biden's age and memory lapses, and predicting a sympathetic jury, Hur ultimately recommended no charges be brought against Biden. That decision frustrated both Republicans and Democrats, but for different reasons, so Hur testified Tuesday before House judiciary and oversight committees to explain his decisions.
Hur's performance was reminiscent of former FBI Director James Comey’s Hillary Clinton-friendly conclusions when explaining the use of classified material on home web servers by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential opponent.
Mike Davis, Article III Project founder, said Tuesday on Washington Watch that Hur’s report and testimony are straddling the fence.
“Remember, Robert Hur is James Comey’s protégé, and James Comey did the same thing with Hillary Clinton’s illegal home server with our nation’s most classified secrets," Davis said. "Comey came out and said yeah, Hillary essentially violated the Espionage Act, but no reasonable jury would find her guilty of that. It’s the same game Robert Hur is playing here."
Comey was hired as FBI director by President Barack Obama and retained by Trump, but he later fired when Trump was angered by his handling of Trump’s alleged election collusion with Russia.
For the Democrats angry at Hur for concluding Biden has a "diminished mental capacity,” Davis said, they need to recognize Hur has a "slam-dunk case" of Espionage Act violations.
"And that Hur did Biden a huge favor," Davis argued, "by not recommending that there be a criminal indictment against Biden when he leaves office.”
If Hur’s presentation before lawmakers walked a political line, his facts did not. Hur testimony did not "exonerate" Biden, which is what many Democrats dishonestly claimed after Hur’s report failed to recommend charges against the President.
Reacting to Hur's testimony, CNN political analyst Scott Jennings reminded fellow panelists Hur plainly told Democrats he did not exonerate Biden in his report.
"That was the main pushback of Democrats after the report came out," Jennings said, but Hur "put that to bed" in his testimony.
Jennings, a former George W. Bush administration staffer, also told the CNN audience Biden was caught in a lie when he denied sharing classified materials with a ghostwriter. The president's memory lapses were also shown to be true, Jennings said, as well as the allegation the White House demanded Hur change his report.
"It’s fairly obvious," Jennings concluded, "that the evidence shows Biden misled the American people about this."
Republicans wise to avoid Biden's mental state
Republicans failed to sufficiently reveal the serious level of Biden’s diminished mental capacity after transcript confirmations cleared the way, legal scholars John Shu and John Yoo wrote in a Fox News op-ed.
The transcript notes more than 100 Biden answers of “don’t know,” “don’t recall”, or “have no (expletive) idea.”
It also notes that it was Biden himself who brought up the subject of his late son, Beau Biden, though the President publicly berated Hur for that alleged line of questioning.
Shu and Yoo encourage further action from Congress, saying lawmakers “owe it to the American public.”
Ron Coleman, of the Dhillon Law Group, said on American Family Radio Wednesday he doesn’t believe Republicans would have benefitted Tuesday from hammering away at Biden's diminished mental state.
It was more important, Coleman said, to illustrate how Biden’s Department of Justice is eager to let him skate on a classified documents charge while going hard after Trump on the same charge.
“More important than demonstrating that Biden is incompetent because, frankly, at this point, the only people who claim not to think so are rabid partisans, I think the idea was to demonstrate the utter bankruptcy of the Justice Department’s approach to consistency, which is none. It has no consistency. There is a two-tiered justice system. This was an opportunity to flesh that out,” Coleman told show host Jenna Ellis.
Will 'two-tiered' justice system help Trump?
How much Hur’s report and testimony help Trump's presidential campaign remains to be seen.
Americans understand the danger of a two-tiered justice system but putting that in play as a legal defense won’t be easy, Coleman predicted.
"It's going to be pretty hard," he said. "Selective prosecution is really not a defense. In a civil case, if you’ve got some kind of violation of rights, and you can’t say, ‘Why didn’t you sue other people who also did the same thing,’ you also generally can’t say, ‘Why didn’t you prosecute other people who did the same thing?’ I don’t think they can use it but I do think it colors the entire political and to some extent legal discussion."
While the testimony in front of Congress was largely political theatre, it proved that Hur’s investigation was much more than that – even without charges being brought, Coleman said.
“The hearing was a political event, but he sounded like someone who actually was very, very thorough and very committed to the idea that there had been a crime committed and that … my impression is that he would have brought charges if it weren't for the political impossibility of doing so.”
