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Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday announced that attorney Robert Hur, who was appointed as U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland under the Trump administration, will be the special counsel to look into the classified documents that President Joe Biden had in his possession.
Garland assigned U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch to carry out a preliminary review of the documents, ABC News reported.
"On January 5th, 2023, Mr. Lausch briefed me on the results of his initial investigation and advised me that further investigation by a special counsel was warranted. Based on Mr. Lausch's initial investigation, I concluded that, under the special counsel regulations, it was in the public interest to appoint a special counsel," Garland said. "In the days since, while Mr. Lausch continued the investigation, the department identified Mr. Hur for appointment as special counsel."
The announcement comes after the White House confirmed that Obama-era classified documents were found at his private residence in Wilmington, Delaware.
Biden has defended storing the documents at a storage space in his home garage, saying on Thursday that "it's not like they're sitting in the street."
An initial batch of classified documents was discovered in November by Biden's attorneys in his former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement think tank in Washington, D.C.
Republicans have called for Garland to task a special counsel in the Biden documents case in the same way he assigned one to look into the hundreds of highly classified documents that the FBI in August retrieved from former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.
Who is Robert K. Hur?
When Trump was president, he nominated Hur to be U.S. attorney in Maryland in 2018, and the lawyer served in that role until he resigned in 2021, according to his bio on Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a law firm of which he is a partner.
"Presidentially appointed and unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate, he served from 2018 to 2021 as the chief federal law enforcement officer in Maryland, setting strategic priorities for and supervising one of the largest and busiest U.S. Attorney's Offices in the nation," his bio read.
Hur's office handled a number of issues when he was serving as U.S. attorney related to national security, cybercrime, financial fraud, and public corruption.
He was assistant to the U.S. Attorney in the District of Maryland from 2007 to 2014, and in that role, he prosecuted "gang violence, firearms offenses, and narcotics trafficking, as well as white-collar offenses including financial institutions fraud, public corruption, mortgage fraud, tax offenses, computer network intrusions, and intellectual property theft."
Hur was awarded the Attorney General's Distinguished Service Award for showing excellent performance as a lawyer.
The new special counsel also served as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General with the Department of Justice before becoming U.S. Attorney. In this role, Hur helped with oversight of all components of the DOJ, including the national security, civil, criminal, and antitrust divisions, all 93 U.S. Attorney's offices, and the FBI, according to his bio.
Additionally, he acted as a liaison between the DOJ and the White House as well as Congressional committees and federal agencies. A Stanford Law School graduate, Hur served as a law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and federal appellate judge Alex Kozinski.
Newsweek reached out to the White House and Robert Hur for comment.
About the writer
Fatma Khaled is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in New York City. Her focus is reporting on U.S. politics, world ... Read more