‘Confidential’ in name only: Merrick Garland’s delicate decision to release the Hur report – By Betsy Woodruff Swan, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein (Politico) / Feb 9, 2024
The White House is livid over the Justice Department’s release of a special counsel report that painted a devastating portrait of Joe Biden. But Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to release it was a foregone conclusion — and anything short of publicizing the full report would have been worse.
Technically, the report from special counsel Robert Hur on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents is considered confidential under DOJ rules. Hur even labeled it as such.
In practice, though, burying or censoring the report would have been untenable, former Justice Department leaders say.
They described a high-stakes calculus for both Garland and Hur informed by previous politically sensitive investigations: Special counsel reports have always been made public in recent years, and Garland would have been slammed by Republicans and the press if he tried to keep this one under wraps. Hur, meanwhile, clearly understood that political reality, so the harsh language he included was exactly what he expected the public to see.
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