Who is Robert Hur ? Joe Biden's team expresses fear over mishandling of classified docs, including 'embarrassing' photos

United States Department of Justice Special Counsel Robert Hur is preparing an imminent report on the handling of classified documents, and that has reportedly left the Joe Biden re-election camp extremely worried in terms of how it might impact Biden's re-election chances. According to Axios, the report may even contain embarrassing photographs and details on how the president stored classified material.

The Biden camp expects possible political retaliation and comparisons from GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, who was indicted for his handling of classified material. Before attaining his current position, Hur was the 48th United States Attorney for the District of Maryland, nominated by none other than President Trump himself.

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Robert Hur and his highly anticipated final report

Receiving his J.D. from Stanford Law School and an A.B. degree from Harvard with highest honors, Robert Hur in the early days of his career served as a law clerk for former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski. From 2016 to 2017, he served as the DOJ's Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.

Later in 2017, Hur was nominated by then-President Donald Trump as the 48th United States Attorney for the District of Maryland. He served in the position from 2018 to 2022. After that, he became a Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner. However, he came back into the political and federal spotlight in 2023.

In January of 2023, Hur was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland as a Special Counsel in charge of the investigation into the discovery of classified documents from President Joe Biden's Penn Biden Center think tank private office and the garage of his private residence in Wilmington, Delaware in late 2022. The documents belonged to the time when Biden served as President Obama's Vice President.

According to a report published by Axios, Robert is expected to write a report on the investigation which will be published at an unknown date, possibly even during this week. The publishing of the report could hand a major blow to the President's re-election campaign.

The Trump campaign could use this as potential ammunition and draw comparisons to the felony charges faced by Trump for resisting government efforts and refusing to give up the classified documents that were stored in the Mar-a-Lago even after his presidency was over.

Photographs of classified documents stored in the Mar-a-Lago were released to the public, thereby drawing concerns about whether the same would be done in this case too. Willful retention of national defense information and obstruction of justice are two among the whopping 40 criminal charges faced by the former president in the case.

While talking in a PBS News Hour interview back in 2023, Biden said, regarding the documents:

"The best of my knowledge, the kinds of things they picked up are things that are from 1974 and stray papers – there may be something else, I don’t know,"

He even criticized his staffers by saying:

"One of the things that happened is that, what was not done well, is as they packed up my offices to move them, they didn’t do the kind of job that should have been done to go thoroughly through every single piece of literature that’s there,"

When a Fox News reporter asked him a question regarding the discovery of the material in 2023, he said:

"By the way, my Corvette's in a locked garage, OK? So it's not like they're sitting out on the street,"

According to Axios, the Joe Biden camp is not expecting any criminal charges to arise out of Robert Hur's report but only fears a huge political impact on the president's re-election campaign.