Colby HallFeb 9th, 2024, 9:05 am
Former U.S. prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg knew that defending the Special Counsel report on Biden docs would make him “unbelievably unpopular” on Morning Joe, Friday morning.
At issue is the report from Special Counsel Robert Hur, which concluded President Joe Biden should not be charged for his mishandling of classified material in no small part because of his mental decline, describing the commander-in-chief as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The hosts and assembled pundits of Morning Joe were nearly unanimously in contemptuous agreement that Hur’s report unfairly included “gratuitous” partisan shots at Biden because the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney was a “Trumper” who put out “garbage.” They were angry.
There was one outlier on Friday morning’s show, however, and it was the one guy who actually knew what he was talking about, though he was well aware of the mood of the room. “So let me start down a path, Willie, that will make me unbelievably unpopular this morning,” Rosenberg started.
“So number one, under the special counsel regulations, Hur, the special counsel, has an obligation,” Rosenberg explained. “He shall write a report. He must write a report. If you’re writing a report to the attorney general of the United States and you recommend that someone not be prosecuted, which I think is the right recommendation, then you would tell the attorney general why you think that person ought not be prosecuted.”
“I was a federal prosecutor for a long time,” he continued. “We assess our witnesses, we assess our cases. We talk about them. We talk about it. We talk about the factors that we think will and will not play in front of the jury. If Rob Hur’s assessment was that Mr. Biden was sympathetic or that he had a faulty memory, that is absolutely something you would tell the attorney general in a confidential report.”
“When the report goes from her to the attorney general, Merrick Garland, it is a confidential report,” he added. “Then it is up to Merrick Garland whether or not to release it in part or in whole. I think this is a flaw in the special counsel regulations. When I was a prosecutor, if I decided the case was not meritorious, I would close it. Period. The end. I wouldn’t talk about it. I would close it.”
“But as a Special Counsel, you can’t do that,” Rosenberg concluded. “You must write the report. So it doesn’t make sense to me, Willie, that if I’m telling the Attorney General of the United States why someone ought not to be prosecuted, that I wouldn’t also tell him exactly why I came to that conclusion.”
Rosenberg didn’t mention former Attorney General Bill Barr by name. Still, the manner in which Robert Mueller’s findings were first revealed in a letter that many critics thought was highly favorable to former President Donald Trump was clearly the subtext in these comments. Rosenberg’s subtle criticism of Garland was unmistakable.
Watch above via MSNBC.
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