The United States prosecutor Robert Hur who sparked a political storm last month with a report alleging President Joe Biden had a “poor memory”, defended his opinion in congressional testimony on Tuesday.
Hur claimed it was required for his probe. He called that the descriptions of Biden’s memory “necessary, accurate and fair”.
Hur, the former US Special Counsel, spoke to the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, which has been one of the panels conducting an impeachment inquiry into Biden.
He said, “There has been a lot of attention paid to language in the report about the president’s memory, so let me say a few words about that.”
He added, “My task was to determine whether the president retained national defense information willfully – meaning, knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids. I could not make that determination without assessing the president’s state of mind.”
Hur added that for that reason, he had to “consider the president’s memory and overall mental state, and how a jury likely would perceive his memory and mental state in a criminal trial”.
According to Hur, the assessment in his report about the relevance of the president’s memory was “necessary and accurate and fair”.
“Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe’, said Hur.
He said that he did not sanitize his explanation and neither did he deprecate the president unfairly. He said he explained to the attorney general his decision.
Comments