Psaki Asks If Hur Should Be ‘Investigated’ After Biden Attorney Rips Special Counsel Report To Shreds
MSNBC host and ex-Biden press secretary Jen Psaki asked Biden attorney Bob Bauer special counsel Robert Hur should be “investigated” after Bauer tore Hur’s report on President Joe Biden to shreds.
Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of sensitive documents dropped Thursday. The good news for Biden is there will be no charges against the president — but the bad news is the report is chock full of damaging asides about him and his memory.
Biden responded to the report Thursday night in a fiery press scrum, and other officials and allies have followed suit — including Bauer.
On Monday’s edition of MSNBC’s Inside With Jen Psaki, Psaki and Bauer trashed the “insinuations” in Hur’s report and pushed back on them, with Bauer pointing out that he would never question Hur’s “mental acuity” based on errors he made during the interview with Biden.
Psaki concluded by asking if Hur should be “investigated” and Bauer had some more choice words for Hur:
PSAKI: You know, one of the points that you’ve made and other legal minds have said about this report is that it kind of goes, of course, outside of the scope of norms. It goes — his reporting and who he talked to went outside of what would be normal, even for a special counsel.
Do you think that should be investigated or looked into? Because the judicial system, the judiciary is kind of not a positive view necessarily by the American public at this point.
BAUER: Well, in the role that I have, all I can do is point it out, which is you had an investigation that ran for 15 months, which could have been concluded in just a few months. There was never any questions the president had not engaged in criminal wrongdoing. He was the self-reporting party here. He had turned the documents over upon discovery, cooperated in every respect.
And yet somehow in this report, the special counsel felt compelled to engage in this irrelevant, unfounded, and often pejorative commentary. And I think it’s clear that that commentary is inconsistent with department norms.
And let me just make one point. I want to stress it. The special counsel is bound by the norms and policies of the department, like any other prosecutor. The special counsel regulations provide that he is bound by those norms and policies. He doesn’t have an exemption from them. There’s some view that perhaps because he’s a special counsel, he didn’t have to observe them. And that is simply not correct by the terms of the rules. He is to comply with those norms and policies. And he didn’t.
PSAKI: Do you wish the attorney general had done more? Could he have?
BAUER: I’m not going to — I’m not going to speak to anybody other than the special counsel and his performance in that particular report.
The president said the other night that he understood why the attorney general and thought, you know, he could not only understand, but did not find fault with the attorney general’s decision to appoint a special counsel.
It was at that point that I got involved. And so I can speak to what the special counsel did for which the special counsel bears the responsibility.
PSAKI: Bob Bauer, thank you. I know you taught a long class before you joined us, so I appreciate you making the time for us tonight.
BAUER: It was a pleasure. Thank you so much, Jen.
Watch above via MSNBC’s Inside With Jen Psaki.
