CNN host Jake Tapper reminded Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., how he was “relentlessly harsh against Special Counsel Robert Hur” and his report on President Biden despite it being “pretty accurate.”
During a segment on Thursday, Tapper brought up Schiff’s questioning of President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, particularly after she claimed most Americans no longer trust the Justice Department.
Schiff blamed Republicans “trashing” the DOJ, but Tapper remarked that he and other Democrats have also attacked the Justice Department in the past.
“President Biden gave a pretty harsh assessment of the investigation into his son Hunter,” Tapper began. “He basically threw the Justice Department under the bus there for those investigations. And Democrats, including you, were relentlessly harsh against Special Counsel Robert Hur for making an observation that proved pretty accurate, about how Joe Biden might appear to a jury as a ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’”
“I was critical of that for good reason,” Schiff argued. “And that is, you don’t put gratuitous personal observations like that in a prosecutorial memo. You just don’t. And it was done for a political reason. So it’s not that, you know, everyone, including special counsels, necessarily follow [Department of Justice] policy the way I believe they should. And when they don’t, I call it out. And as indeed I did, I disagreed with the president’s comments about the prosecution of his own son.”
Schiff continued to blame Republicans for a “a multi-year campaign” to paint the Justice Department as the “deep state.” Tapper briefly explained the context of Hur’s comments before moving on to another topic.
“I think Robert Hur would say he needed to explain why he wasn’t going to prosecute President Biden for what he thought was a violation of the law,” Tapper said.
Though Hur found that Biden willfully retained classified materials in violation of the law, he ultimately wrote in his February report that he would not recommend charging him based on his diminished mental capacity.
“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote.
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Schiff viciously attacked Hur on this report when he questioned him during a House hearing in March.
“I want to go back to your opening statement in which you said that you did not disparage the president, your report, but of course, you did disparage the president,” Schiff said at the time. “You disparaged him in terms you had to know would have a maximal political impact. You understood your report would be public, right?”
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He continued, “What you did write was deeply prejudicial to the interests of the president, you say it wasn’t political, and yet you must have understood. You must have understood the impact of your words. You must have understood the impact of your decision to go beyond the specifics of a particular document, to go to the very general, to your own personal prejudicial, subjective opinion of the president, one you knew would be amplified by his political opponent. When you knew that would influence a political campaign, you had to understand, and you did it anyway. You did it anyway.”
