Trump appointee named special counsel in Biden papers investigation

The move to name Robert Hur, a former Trump-appointed federal prosecutor and former top justice department official, was a rapid decision from Garland to insulate the department from possible accusations of political conflicts or interference.

Special counsels are prosecutors with more independence than other federal prosecutors, who can be installed for high-profile investigations when there are conflicts of interest or the appearance of such conflicts, though they ultimately answer to the attorney general.

The Biden special counsel will examine approximately 10 classified documents found at the thinkthank, which included US intelligence memos and some materials marked as Top Secret/Secret Compartmented Information, and an unconfirmed additional number of classified documents that were in the garage and a storage space nearby.

From the information released so far, there are major differences between the Biden case and that involving Trump, who retained hundreds of classified documents and only partially complied with a grand jury subpoena that led to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last August.

By contrast, Biden and his lawyers proactively returned the classified documents dating back to the Obama administration when he was vice-president to the government as soon as they were discovered. Biden was also not responding to a grand jury subpoena.

Most recently, he was a partner at the highly esteemed law firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher after he left the justice department at the end of the Trump administration, where he served as the principal associate deputy attorney general, the top adviser role to the deputy attorney general.