KEY POINTS
- Attorney Bob Bauer said there are concerns about how President Joe Biden is portrayed in the special counsel report
- The concerns were raised with the special counsel and the attorney general, Bauer said
- Bauer said the report "goes off the rails" and called it a "shabby piece of work"
President Joe Biden's personal attorney Bob Bauer registered his concerns with the special counsel Robert Hur and the attorney general over the "pejorative" comments about Biden made in the Hur report, which Bauer called a "shabby work product."
"This is a report that went off the rails. It's shabby work product," attorney Bob Bauer said on CBS' Face the Nation Sunday.
Hur report was the conclusion of special counsel's probe on whether the president mishandled classified documents during his previous positions as vice president and senator.
The report released Thursday cleared him of any wrong doing. The report said that Biden "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials," but the evidence did not support prosecuting the president.
"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.
The special counsel's decision not to prosecute Biden was in their favor, but Bauer said he asked the special counsel and Attorney General Merrick Garland to reevaluate the language of the report.
Bauer said he raised concerns over the inclusion of certain details, which he sees as a violation of the Justice Department norms of avoiding the process of influencing the public opinion about individuals, who have not been criminally charged. However, the appeal failed, according to AP News.
"The investigation could have been concluded in two or three months," Bauer said in the interview. "It went on for over 15 months. And so along with a legal conclusion comes this flood of characterizations, factual misstatements, pejorative comments about the President that are inconsistent with DOJ policy and norms. And that, as you see over the last 48 hours have been widely criticized by legal experts. This is not what prosecutors do. It is shoddy work product."
"The special counsel's decision to cherry pick, in a very misleading way ... is an example of what I call a really shabby work product and completely out of bounds for a prosecutor," he added.
Following Hur's report that said the incumbent president has memory issues, concerns over Biden's age have surged among voters as they question whether he will be able to complete a second term at the White House if re-elected.
When asked in Sunday's interview about whether the president had any memory problems, Bauer said, "he does not."
"As legal experts around the country are saying, it just goes off the rails," Bauer said about the report. "It's a shabby piece of work. He arrived at the right legal conclusion and then 400 page laters [sic] misstatements of facts and totally inappropriate and pejorative comments that are unfounded and not supported by the record."
