President Joe Biden’s lawyers have negotiated with Special Counsel Robert Hur for the past month regarding a potential interview as part of an investigation into the president’s handling of classified documents.
NBC News reports that Hur’s team has been in contact with Biden's lawyers to hammer out the timing, location, and what issues would be covered in a potential interview. The negotiations are ongoing and no agreement has been reached about whether Biden will sit down for an interview, according to NBC News. He is represented in the investigation by Bob Bauer, a veteran Democratic attorney who is married to Biden adviser Anita Dunn.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur as special counsel on Jan. 12 to investigate the handling of classified records discovered at Biden’s home in Delaware and his office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. An attorney for Biden found a batch of documents at the Penn Biden Center on Nov. 2, days before the midterm elections, but the discovery was not disclosed until late December. The documents are reportedly from Biden’s time as vice president and involve intelligence about the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Iran. Biden stored some of the records in his garage, next to his classic Corvette Stingray convertible.
The pace of Hur’s probe is in stark contrast to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of former president Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents. Smith, who was appointed special counsel on Nov. 18, charged Trump on June 8 with mishandling classified documents after he left office, and issued new charges against the Republican on July 27.
While Garland has hailed Hur as an "even-handed" prosecutor, some Republicans have called that claim into question given his past work at the Justice Department. In 2018, Hur was part of a Justice Department team that tried to block the release of a Republican memo that exposed flaws in the government’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
"Hur looks like a fixer for the Democrats and the Deep State," former representative Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the author of the memo, told the Free Beacon earlier this year.