Merrick Garland's Biden Special Counsel Sparks Anger About Trump Probe

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland wasted little time in appointing a special counsel to investigate President Joe Biden after White House officials publicly revealed a small cache of classified documents had been discovered at his former office at the University of Pennsylvania and his home in Delaware.

Garland announced Thursday that he was appointing former Justice Department prosecutor and U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Robert K. Hur to lead the investigation in what would be the first special counsel probe into a sitting Democratic president in roughly two decades.

"This appointment underscores for the public the Department's commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law," Garland said in a statement.

"I am confident that Mr. Hur will carry out his responsibility in an even-handed and urgent manner, and in accordance with the highest traditions of this Department."

The decision was met by praise—as well as disappointment—by conservatives irked with Garland's treatment of former President Donald Trump in a similar case involving an even larger cache of classified documents he'd removed from his time in office, followed by refusal to return them to the National Archives when requested.

Some expressed distrust at Garland's ability to appoint an impartial counsel, while others noted that Hur was a special assistant to FBI Director Christopher Wray, who has also attracted conservatives' ire for his agency's role in Trump's case.

However, there was also ample outrage from liberals, who felt Garland's appointment was an overcompensating attempt to appear neutral at a fraught time politically for the Department of Justice.

"Of course this was always going to end up with two special counsels," MSNBC host Chris Hayes wrote after the announcement.

Some took issue with the timing of the announcement.

It took Garland several months to designate a special counsel—Jack Smith—in the case involving Trump after a lengthy period in which his office faced immense public scrutiny for deciding whether to appoint outside counsel to investigate the case or handle it in-house.

Though it has been known Biden has illegally possessed classified material since November, the news only became public this week, after which it took Garland just a couple days to appoint a special counsel.

"Wow, so Merrick Garland really can move faster than he has been," New York City writer Brooke Binkowski wrote on Twitter. "Good to know."

There were also key distinctions in the backgrounds of who Garland appointed to lead the investigations.

Though Smith was appointed to the U.S. Attorney's Office under Democratic President Barack Obama, he was later appointed Acting United States Attorney for several months under Trump in 2017 before leaving for the private sector, and he led a number of public corruption cases against lawmakers of both parties as head of the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department.

Hur, meanwhile, comes from a clear conservative pedigree. Appointed to lead the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland under the Trump administration, he once served as a clerk for the staunchly conservative U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and, later, for President Ronald Reagan appointee Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Those ties prompted some suspicions from liberals that Garland's appointment was purely to create the appearance of impartiality amid its ongoing probe of Trump.

"Garland appointed a non-Biden guy who'd been abroad to be the Trump special counsel. Trump & Fox accused Smith of bias anyways. For Biden, he just openly went and hired a recent Trump appointee. A reminder of how asymmetric our politics is & how GOP always seems to benefit," liberal MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan wrote on Twitter.

Newsweek reached out to the Department of Justice for comment.