Hur says he didn’t expect ‘level of vitriol’ after special counsel report

Special counsel Robert Hur said he didn’t expect how cruel critics would be after he released his report on President Biden’s handling of classified documents.

“I knew it was going to be unpleasant,” he said in an interview with The New Yorker. “But the level of vitriol — it’s hard to know exactly how intense that’s going to be until the rotten fruit is being thrown at you.”

Hur, who testified before Congress last week, infuriated both sides of the aisle with his report. Republicans have criticized him for declining to prosecute Biden, and Democrats, including Biden, have criticized him for claiming in his report that the president is an elderly man with memory problems based on their interviews.

Hur told The New Yorker that he wrote his report only for Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appointed him to the special counsel position.

“I didn’t write it for law students. I didn’t write it for the lay public, and I didn’t write it for Congress. I wrote it for the attorney general of the United States, who himself was an experienced prosecutor,” Hur said.

He also insisted that he doesn’t have a partisan mindset, which Democrats accused him of while bashing him for his critical remarks about Biden in the report.

“I’m just doing the work,” he said. “I don’t have a particular ideology or crusade that I’m trying to go after.”

Hur resigned from the Department of Justice following the conclusion of his investigation and before his testimony. Similarly, Robert Mueller who led the investigation into Russian inference in the 2016 election, resigned after the conclusion of his investigation.

“Look, if Mueller did it this way, then there must be some reasons,” Hur said in the interview. “I don’t want to make history here.”

Hur was hammered by Republicans and Democrats last week about his report and said in his testimony that his report did not “exonerate” Biden as some Democrats claimed, though he ultimately did not find charges were warranted. 

Following Hur’s testimony last week, the White House said it was “time to move on” from the report and declared it “case closed.”