Last month, Sean Hannity once again hosted the House Republicans leading the effort to build a case for impeaching President Biden. Hannity’s been a central engine of the right-wing media effort to bolster support for the impeachment push initiated under former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in September. That night had the same intent, allowing House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) to explain new developments in that effort.
At one point, he turned to Jordan.
“Let’s get your take on the developments today,” Hannity said, outlining various documents and material that he thought Republicans should seek as part of the impeachment inquiry. “Is there any chance that that we’ll get a hold of all of this, so that maybe you can put this whole thing together?”
“What we really want now,” Jordan replied, “is we want the information Robert Hur has.”
A week or two earlier, special counsel Robert K. Hur had released a report summarizing his investigation into Biden’s possession of classified documents after having left service as the vice president. The report triggered a flurry of negative press for Biden, largely centered on Hur’s description of Biden as having difficulty remembering details. (The full transcript of the Biden interview suggests that this description was sharper than was warranted.) In other words, the Hur report achieved something that the impeachment inquiry didn’t: generating a lot of negative attention for Biden, even outside the rigid boundaries of the right-wing media ecosystem.
So, asked about the impeachment probe and the effort to try to link Biden to his son’s and brother’s private business efforts, Jordan told Hannity that what he really wanted was to dig in deeper on Hur.
On Tuesday, he got his chance. Hur appeared at a hearing hosted by the Judiciary Committee — attended by Comer and led by Jordan — to discuss his findings and report. Before the hearing, the full transcript of his two days of interviews with the president was made public. And while the conversation between Hur’s team and Biden does broach the issue of classified documents, it also explains clearly how Biden viewed his post-vice-presidential efforts — and significantly undercuts the idea that he aimed to be engaged with his family’s business efforts.
Of primary importance is Biden’s assertion to Hur that, upon leaving the White House in 2017, he didn’t see his political career as over. He’d taken a position with the University of Pennsylvania but, he said, “I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for President.”
In other words, he approached his entry into the private sector — for the first time since 1973! — as a potential or even likely interregnum. The guy who had been in politics, been a politician for more than four decades had an eye toward running for national office once again. This is not proof that Biden wouldn’t then engage in dubious business deals with his son and brother’s foreign partners, but it certainly elevates the threshold of credibility for allegations that he did.
How did Biden plan to make money after leaving the White House, then? Biden explained that, too.
“I was going to become a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” Biden said, “and I was working at the University of Delaware for the Biden School on domestic policy.” Asked how much of his time he expected this to occupy, Biden replied, “All of it.”
But that wasn’t correct. Biden also spent his time working on the book “Promise Me, Dad,” about his son Beau Biden’s life and death. Hur asked how much time Biden anticipated that book would take to write.
“It took more time than the first book I wrote,” he said. “I wrote a best seller early on, it was on the Best Seller’s list. And then what, I wanted to do was write a book about my son, because he was a remarkable man.”
And he also was still engaged in the effort he began as vice president to find a cure for cancer — itself a response to Beau Biden’s death. This, too, is why he said that Penn appealed: The school also had a medical school with a cancer facility.
It’s useful to articulate this because it demonstrates that Biden didn’t walk out of the White House and into a new era of retirement and free time. He was not looking for work, if you will.
Nor was he looking for money, it seems. Hur’s report details that Biden received an $8 million advance for “Promise Me, Dad.”
The book was written with the assistance of a ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, with work beginning while Biden was still vice president. Hur’s report indicates that writing the book involved the use of notebooks created by Biden that included classified information.
Jordan seized on this as he questioned Hur during Tuesday’s hearing.
“Eight million dollars!” Jordan crowed, suggesting that the book advance offered motive for Biden to willfully retain classified material. “Eight million reasons to break the rules!”
Biden “knew the rules,” Jordan added, “but he broke them for $8 million in a book advance!”
This argument, by itself, isn’t tenable. There’s no indication that the material Hur references was essential to the Beau Biden story or to the publisher offering the advance. Hur’s report indicates that the material wasn’t used in the book. But view it from Jordan’s perspective: At last, he has a tenuous link between Biden taking money and his doing something described by a third-party as inappropriate.
Comer, given a chance to ask questions of Hur, tried to backstop the impeachment inquiry without much effect. Unfortunately, Hur’s actual work significantly undercut the idea that Biden was working in cahoots with his family.