like the partisan divide has become so deep that even merrick garland who s pretty much in the center, i ve got to outsource this to someone else because i m too hot for them to handle. that to me does not seem very good that there are four special counsels in six years compared to where we ve been in decades past. i agree. a lot of that has to do, i think, with donald trump s behavior and that you see, you know, russia finding emails. i think the investigation into trump in this campaign with russia was legitimate and it had to happen. then there s pressure when durham is looking into that russian investigation. to durham s credit, he had two low-level cases and he lost those at trial. durham has not been a ken staar.
extraordinary circumstances called for the appointment of a special counsel. robert hur who was appointed by president trump said today in a statement, i will 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. the attorney general s announcement came after we learned that another set of classified documents from president joe biden s time as vice president, that another set was found in his garage in wilmington, delaware, this after a dozen documents were found at the dc think tank. they alerted the justice department about the discovery of the documents on december 20th. the white house then alerted the doj this morning of a single classified document found in an adjacent room in biden s wilmington home. biden reiterated today he and his office are fully cooperated with the doj.
best interest of the country. the speaker of the house, kevin mccarthy has mixed feelings about this. on the one hand, throwing president biden under the microscope was exactly what he wanted to do, but on the other hand, he wanted to do it with his committee and his people. here was kevin mccarthy this morning. i think congress has to investigate this. in the end it s kind of awkward to claim the federal government is weaponized against you when it s simultaneously announcing a criminal investigation into your political opponent. joining us now is charlie savage covering the story for the new york times and matt miller for the justice department. thank you both for being here. charlie, i wonder if you can tell us at all from your reporting the degree to which garland was making a political calculation among other things here, the degree to which the pressure that the right wing had been the campaign, i will say, that they had been waging
comparisons and a lot of what-aboutisms. we re talking about hundreds of documents in a willful attempt of turning over the documents to the doj. that s different from what we re hearing. but a special counsel was still appointed, and it was said a lot on our air yesterday that a special counsel is appointed if there s a suspicion of wrongdoing. how much legal jeopardy is president biden in right now? it s not clear, right? because we re just opening a criminal investigation. and i would say that not only are there circumstance of what each of the men are thought to have done very different, john, but the stages are also quite different. the investigation with respect to former president trump was very well developed. there were accusations of criminality. they had a search warjt.
they went to a judge and said we have probable cause to believe these three specific statutes were violated. we re in a very different place with president biden not only on the facts but just in terms of where we are in that investigation. so it s really hard to say at this point, particularly given the limited information given to the public whether president biden or anyone around his is fames legal jeopardy. i would say the legal jeopardy as we understand it right now is far less because as you said there s not willfulness. lisa, tell us about robert hur, the man now, special counsel. robert hur has an extensive background in law enforcement and there are a couple of things our viewers should know. one thing people should know, he s an old school person of