Robert Hur: special counsel in Biden documents case was Trump appointee

Robert Hur, appointed on Thursday as special counsel in the case of Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents while out of office, is according to his LinkedIn profile a “seasoned trial lawyer, former supreme court law clerk and former US attorney … with decades of experience in government and in private practice”.

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An appointee of Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, the 50-year-old was US attorney for Maryland from 2018 to 2021 before becoming a partner at Gibson Dunn, a Washington law firm specializing in white-collar “enforcement, investigations and litigation”.

Andrew McCabe, a former FBI deputy director turned CNN law enforcement analyst, said Hur was a “well-informed, industrious, hard-working guy”.

McCabe worked with Hur in 2017, when the Harvard and Stanford law graduate was principal associate deputy attorney general at the justice department.

McCabe said it was “not insignificant” that a Trump appointee had been charged with overseeing the Biden investigation, a move McCabe said would help temper any accusations of political bias.

Hur was born in New York and graduated from law school in 2001. He clerked for William Rehnquist, then chief justice of the US supreme court, and later for Alex Kozinski, a judge on the US ninth circuit court of appeal.

Hur moved into private practice in 2014. Before joining the justice department in 2017, he completed two terms as a director of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of DC.

At the justice department, he was principal counselor to the then deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, in oversight of the national security, civil, criminal and antitrust divisions, and liaised with the White House, congressional committees and federal intelligence, enforcement and regulatory agencies. In April 2018, he became US attorney for Maryland.

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Online, Hur describes himself as “an experienced trial lawyer, having tried 14 cases as a federal prosecutor and in private practice”.

In 2020, as US attorney, his LinkedIn profile states, Hur tried and won conviction in an international money-laundering trial that was the first in-person federal jury trial conducted in the Washington DC region during the Covid pandemic.

From 2018 to 2021, Hur was a member of the Maryland governor’s council on gangs and violent criminal networks. In 2021, he was chair of the Asian American hate crimes work group.