Jim Jordan gets Hur to make damning admission about Biden's motive for retaining classified docs: '$8 million'

Special counsel Robert Hur admitted Tuesday that his investigation found evidence that Joe Biden retained classified materials to enrich himself.

During a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked Hur to speculate about Biden's motive for retaining classified information. At first, Hur declined to comment on Biden's possible motive, which prompted Jordan to cite Hur's own words.

In his report, Hur said Biden had "strong motivations" for ignoring regulations safeguarding classified information because he wanted to write a book. Hur wrote:

Mr. Biden had strong motivations to ignore the proper procedures for safeguarding the classified information in his notebooks. He decided months before leaving office to write a book and began meeting with his ghostwriter while still vice president. After his vice presidency, the notebooks continued to be an invaluable resource that he consulted liberally. During hours of recorded interviews in which he read aloud from his notebooks in his private home, Mr. Biden provided raw material to his ghostwriter detailing meetings and events that would be of interest to prospective readers and buyers of his book.

Next, Jordan asked Hur about the advance Biden received for that book, "Promise Me, Dad." According to Hur's report, Biden received $8 million — a highly lucrative deal.

"Joe Biden had 8 million reasons to break the rules. He took classified information and shared it with the guy who was writing the book," Jordan said. "He knew the rules, but he broke them for $8 million in a book advance."

Next, Jordan highlighted Hur's assessment that Biden retained classified documents to "buttress" his view that he played an important role in history.

Hur wrote in the report:

[Biden] also likely viewed the notebooks, like the marked classified documents related to Afghanistan recovered from his garage, as an irreplaceable contemporaneous record of some of the most important moments of his vice presidency. This record was valuable to him for many reasons, including to help defend his record and buttress his legacy as a world leader.

"It wasn't just the money, it wasn't just $8 million, it was his ego!" Jordan summarized. "Pride and money is why he knowingly violated the rules. The oldest motive in the book: pride and money."

In a follow-up question, Jordan asked Hur if he agreed with that assessment — and he did.

"That language does appear in the report and we did identify evidence supporting those assessments," Hur explained.

Hur testified about his investigation and report for more than four hours on Tuesday. Unfortunately, Democrats used the hearing to attack Donald Trump repeatedly and to make false claims about Hur's report.

Specifically, Democrats claimed that Hur "exonerated" Biden or found that he was "outright innocent."

But on multiple occasions, Hur clarified those are not the conclusions he reached. In fact, Hur told Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) that his investigation did not exonerate Biden.

On the contrary, Hur explained in his opening statement that his investigation "identified evidence that the president willfully retained classified materials after the end of his vice presidency, when he was a private citizen."

Despite this evidence, Hur said he did not recommend criminal charges against Biden because he found it unlikely that prosecutors could prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, particularly because of Biden's faulty memory.

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