Robert Hur s Report Is the Work of a Consummate Professional – WSJ

President Obama s former chief of staff Jim Messina characterized Mr. Hur as a lifelong Republican and creature of DC who didn t have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically. MSNBC s Joe Scarborough opined that Mr. Hur couldn t indict Biden legally, so he tried to indict Biden politically.

But the report is no hit job. To the contrary, its contents including the parts documenting Mr. Biden s memory lapses were necessary and appropriate given the Justice Department s rules, with which special counsels and all other federal prosecutors must comply. This policy is in the Justice Manual, formerly known as the United States Attorneys Manual.

Unlike state bar rules, under the Justice Manual probable cause to believe that the would-be defendant committed the crime isn t enough to bring charges. Section 9-27.220 adds the requirement that the prosecutor determine that the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction. In other words, the Justice Manual insists on an analysis of not only whether the person is factually guilty of a crime, but also whether a jury is likely to convict at a trial in which the burden of proof is beyond reasonable doubt, the strictest standard in American law.

In my career as an assistant U.S. attorney in two federal jurisdictions, the question of whether admissible evidence would be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction was always a threshold that every proposed indictment rightly had to get past. Later, when I worked in the Justice Department s Office of Professional Responsibility the internal-affairs office for federal prosecutorial misconduct I saw at least two cases in which a federal prosecutor was investigated and disciplined for failure to take section 9-27.220 seriously enough when bringing charges.

via www.wsj.com