Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents, and the two men will now be the focus of significant attention.
President Biden faces a different kind of special counsel in Hur, who has associations with Republicans and once clerked for the late conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Smith is a career prosecutor who has been criticized by Trump and some of his allies because of his wife’s connections to former first lady Michelle Obama.
Documentary filmmaker Katy Chevigny, who married Smith in 2011, worked as a producer on Becoming, a 2020 documentary film about Obama, and records from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show her campaign donations to Democrats.
Smith spent five years as head of the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice (DOJ) during former President Barack Obama’s administration. In 2015, he joined the U.S. attorney’s office in the Middle District of Tennessee and began prosecuting war crimes at The Hague in 2018.
Hur has associations with the Republican Party, which may have prompted Garland to choose him to oversee the probe to avoid a perception of bias.
The newly appointed special counsel attended Stanford Law School and as well as clerking for Rehnquist, Hur also clerked for Alex Kosinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Both were appointed by Republicans.
Hur worked as principal deputy to former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein from 2017 to 2018. Rosenstein was appointed by former President Trump.
Rosenstein appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, while Hur oversaw Mueller’s probe during his year at the DOJ.
In 2017, Trump nominated Hur to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, and he was confirmed in that position by the Senate by voice vote in March 2018, serving in the role until 2021.
Hur then re-entered private practice at Gibson Dunn law firm, based in Washington, D.C., but he will now become the focus of significant media and political attention as he investigates Biden’s handling of documents.
The White House confirmed this week that classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president were discovered in his former office at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
A second batch of documents was then discovered at the president’s home in Wilmington, Delaware.
In a statement issued on Thursday, Hur said he would “conduct the assigned investigation with fair, impartial, and dispassionate judgment. I intend to follow the facts swiftly and thoroughly, without fear or favor, and will honor the trust placed in me to perform this service.”
Newsweek has asked the DOJ for comment.
