Category: News

President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday secured the delegates necessary to clinch their parties’ presidential nominations, according to The Associated Press, cementing a general election rematch in November months in the making.

Both men and their campaigns have long anticipated this moment. Mr. Biden faced only token opposition in the Democratic primary, as is typical for a sitting president, while Mr. Trump had been his party’s dominant front-runner for months.

Their November collision began to look even more likely after Mr. Trump scored a decisive win in Iowa in January. His victory cleared the field of all but one of his major Republican rivals and put him on a glide path to his party’s nomination. His last remaining primary challenger, Nikki Haley, suspended her campaign last week, further clearing a path that had already been remarkably free of obstacles for a candidate facing considerable legal problems.

The Associated Press named Mr. Biden the presumptive Democratic nominee after projecting his victory in Georgia, while Mr. Trump was designated the presumptive Republican nominee after he swept the G.O.P. contests in Georgia, Mississippi and Washington State.

Tuesday’s results cleared the way for a 2024 general election campaign that, at just under eight months, is set to be one of the longest in modern American history and will be the country’s first presidential rematch in nearly 70 years.

Already, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden had shifted their focus away from the primaries. With the president facing no significant challengers, Mr. Biden’s campaign speeches emphasized not just his record but the danger he believes is posed by Mr. Trump.

In a statement, Mr. Biden said he was honored that Democratic voters “have put their faith in me once again to lead our party — and our country — in a moment when the threat Trump poses is greater than ever.”

And even as Mr. Trump was working to dispatch his Republican rivals, his campaign speeches centered on criticisms of Mr. Biden and his insistence that the primary needed to come to a swift end so that his party could focus its energy and resources on November.

In a video posted on social media by his campaign after he clinched the nomination, Mr. Trump called Tuesday a “great day of victory,” but said it was immediately time to focus on defeating Mr. Biden in November. “I want to thank everybody, but much more importantly, we have to get to work to beat Joe Biden,” he said.

Neither man will be formally selected until his party’s conventions this summer. But Mr. Biden has already been using the political and financial apparatus of the Democratic National Committee. And last week, the Trump campaign effectively took over the Republican National Committee, imposing mass layoffs on Monday as it reshapes the party’s operations.

That Mr. Trump was able to lock up the Republican nomination fairly quickly demonstrates the grasp he has kept on the party and his conservative base, despite his 2020 loss and failed efforts to overturn it; a string of disappointing midterm losses by candidates he backed; and his 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.

The former president won nearly every nominating contest that awarded delegates, with Ms. Haley scoring wins in only Vermont and Washington, D.C., where she became the first woman to ever win a Republican presidential primary or caucus.

But Mr. Trump’s swift path to the nomination also reflects a backroom effort by him and his political team to bend rules around primaries and delegates in his favor. The rules that states use to award delegates to particular candidates are decided by state party officials, and Mr. Trump and his advisers built relationships with those officials to ease his path.

In one critical example, Mr. Trump’s campaign worked to shape California’s rules, leading party officials there to adopt a “winner take all” system that would award the state’s delegates to a candidate who swept 50 percent of the vote statewide. That threshold favored Mr. Trump, the only candidate polling at that level there.

Mr. Trump ultimately won California’s primary last week, a major moment in the delegate race. California’s 169 delegates gave him 14 percent of the 1,215 delegates needed to win the nomination.

Similarly, Mr. Biden faced little opposition in his march to the nomination, dominating every contest by wide margins. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political scion and environmental lawyer, dropped out of the Democratic nominating contest to run as an independent. Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and the self-help guru Marianne Williamson never attracted more than a fraction of the vote.

Both men’s strength in their primaries may belie weaknesses within their coalitions that could pose difficulty for them in November, particularly given that the 2020 election was decided by narrow margins in just a handful of states.

In some places where Mr. Trump won the Republican contests convincingly, he still performed comparatively weaker with voters in suburban areas and those who identify as moderates or independents. Such groups, whose support Mr. Trump lost in 2020, may be crucial in tightly contested battleground states.

Mr. Biden, for his part, faced a campaign in several primary states that urged voters to protest his handling of Israel’s war in Gaza by voting “uncommitted.” Losing the support of those voters in the fall could weaken the coalition that helped Mr. Biden oust Mr. Trump in 2020.

During Mr. Biden’s first term, voters have questioned his age and his record, even as economic indicators improve. The president has shown weakness with young people and Black and Hispanic voters, key groups in the coalition that powered him to victory last time around.

Mr. Biden is viewed unfavorably by a majority of Americans — a precarious position for a president seeking re-election — although so is Mr. Trump.

Both campaigns have argued that voters who backed them in previous years will return to them as the choice crystallizes.

Mr. Biden and his allied groups also have a significant financial advantage over Mr. Trump, whose legal bills are taking a toll.

With Tuesday’s victories, Mr. Trump has locked up the nomination before any of his four criminal cases have proceeded to trial. His Manhattan criminal case, which stems from a hush-money payment to a porn star in 2016, is set to go to trial on March 25 and is expected to last six weeks.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers had argued unsuccessfully that the timing would interfere with his presidential campaign, pointing in part to the primary calendar.

More recently, Mr. Trump’s legal team made a last-ditch effort to delay the trial before it starts. In court papers made public on Monday, his lawyers argued that the trial should not take place until the Supreme Court has decided whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution in his Washington criminal case, which involves accusations that he plotted to overturn the 2020 election.

The judge in the New York case, Juan M. Merchan, is unlikely to grant the request.

Not one to let “horrific” weather stop him, Craig Muir left his house in Hay-on-Wye in Powys, Wales, early Tuesday to take his usual walk up Hay Bluff when he spotted something large, shiny and new.

Standing there in the distance, like a beacon, was a silver monolith with no apparent trace as to how it got there or what it was doing in that spot.

It looked like it had “just been dropped down from space,” Mr. Muir said during a telephone interview on Tuesday. The sighting immediately captured media attention, calling to mind similar mysterious objects placed around the world in late 2020.

“It must be some sort of art installation,” he said. “If you didn’t know anything, to look at it, you could have easily thought it had been dropped off by a U.F.O. or something.”

Describing the location of the monolith as “the middle of nowhere,” Mr. Muir said there were no visible tracks, but he did see some footprints.

“I don’t know if someone else had seen it,” he said.

Mr. Muir, 37, who works as a stone mason, said the monolith stands roughly 10 feet tall, and that it’s about a foot-and-a-half wide at each point. He said that he didn’t know how deep into the ground it goes.

Calling it a “perfect monolith,” Mr. Muir said it was “exactly like the ones they have in Egypt” but “made of steel, and there’s no markings on there at all.”

The monolith appears to have been made from surgical steel, he said, adding that he did not think it was aluminum because “it had too much shine to it.”

“I’d say it was like a surgical steel because obviously whoever’s done it doesn’t want it to rust,” Mr. Muir said, noting that the monolith must have some heft to it because it wasn’t moving at all despite the strong winds. He also described it as “very, very smooth, very shiny, very crisp edges.”

As someone with welders and metal fabricators in his family, Mr. Muir said he’s around metal a lot, and it was his professional opinion that whoever crafted it did a “real good job.”

“There’s no obvious weld marks,” he said. “It was very, very neat.”

Mr. Muir was apparently not the only person to see it. Richard Haynes, who spoke to WalesOnline, said he had spotted the object while running on Hay Bluff.

“I thought it looked a bit bizarre and might be a scientific media research thing collecting rainwater,” he said.

The Welsh monolith is only the latest of these objects to suddenly, almost magically, appear.

For a time — a few weird months in the depths of the pandemic — things like the one in Wales seemed to be popping up everywhere. A bighorn sheep survey in Utah spotted the first, in November 2020 in a remote canyon in Red Rock County. Even though that one was dismantled under the cover of night a few days later, others were soon built in California, Romania and Turkey.

People widely called them monoliths, because they were large and sheer and appeared in surprising places, like the thing in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” albeit without as much of an aura of mystery and dread. In a few cases, people took credit for their creation. Some other people sought them out, seeking a strange metaphysical experience to rival those in the film. Mostly, though, people took cellphone photos and made internet jokes.

Hay Bluff, which overlooks the town of Hay-on-Wye, is a hill located inside of Brecon Beacons National Park, Mr. Muir said. Unfortunately, it’s this setting that could do away with the monolith sooner rather than later.

“I can’t say how long it will be there, to be honest,” he said. “Knowing our national parks, they don’t take lightly to things being installed without their permission.”

Alan Yuhas contributed reporting and Susan Beachy provided research.

When anti-abortion activists sued the Food and Drug Administration in 2022 seeking to overturn the approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, they filed their suit in the federal court in Amarillo, Texas, where it was all but assured that the case would be heard by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, an outspoken opponent of abortion.

Judge Kacsmaryk, the sole federal judge in Amarillo, wound up agreeing with the plaintiffs that the drug was “unsafe.” In his ruling, he invalidated the F.D.A.’s 23-year-old approval of the drug and opened a new front in the post-Dobbs reckoning over abortion rights.

The suit — and the role of Judge Kacsmaryk, who handles 95 percent of the Amarillo civil caseload — was one of the most striking recent examples of “forum shopping,” where plaintiffs to try to cherry-pick sympathetic judges.

Now, forum shopping is about to get harder.

The panel of federal judges who set policy for the rest of federal judiciary on Tuesday announced a new rule intended to curb the practice in civil cases with nationwide implications, like the mifepristone suit.

In such cases, where plaintiffs are seeking a sweeping remedy, like a nationwide injunction, the judge will be assigned at random from across the district instead of defaulting to the judge or judges in a particular courthouse.

Forum shopping has been used for years by litigants from across the political spectrum who file suit in districts and appellate circuits where they believe the pool of judges will play to their advantage.

In challenging federal immigration policies, advocates for immigrants have often sought out federal courts in California, reasoning that in a more liberal state, there’s a better chance of the case being assigned to a judge who is sympathetic to arguments against the government.

In some cases filed by conservatives, such as the mifepristone challenge, plaintiffs have sought to take forum shopping even further, aiming to have cases assigned to a specific judge they think will take a favorable view of their arguments.

While some of the country’s 94 federal district courts already assign cases randomly, most sort them into “divisions,” judicial subdistricts that funnel cases down to smaller groups of judges. In at least 90 of those divisions, a single judge handled more than half the caseload, according to a 2018 article in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.

Eleven of those, according to the article, are in Texas, where conservatives have won nationwide injunctions against immigration programs, transgender rights and labor policies from the Obama era. The rulings have then been mostly upheld by the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling, which was upheld in part by the Fifth Circuit, is on hold while it awaits review by the Supreme Court.

The effort to address forum shopping comes as the federal judiciary faces mounting pressure to reform itself. After revelations that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had failed to disclose lavish gifts and a forgiven loan on his annual financial disclosures, the Judicial Conference tightened the requirements for reporting free travel and gifts, and the Supreme Court adopted a new code of conduct. Critics have said that these self-imposed measures don’t go far enough to ensure compliance.

Judge Robert J. Conrad Jr., head of the federal courts’ Administrative Office, said the new forum-shopping rollback “promotes the impartiality of proceedings and bolsters public confidence in the federal judiciary.” While the new policy takes effect immediately, how and when to put it into practice will be left to the district courts, said Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who chairs the Judicial Conference’s executive committee.

Critics of forum shopping tend to focus on high-stakes political issues, but the practice has far-reaching implications for more arcane areas of the law as well. In a 2021 letter to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, two U.S. senators raised concerns about a report that a single judge from the Western District of Texas was hearing 25 percent of patent cases nationwide. The senators claimed the judge, Alan D. Albright, was soliciting cases from potential plaintiffs and called the practice “unseemly and inappropriate.”

In his 2021 year-end report, Justice Roberts wrote that geographic divisions were beneficial insofar as federal judges were “tied to their communities” but that they should also be “generalists capable of handling the full range of legal issues.” Judge Albright did not respond to a request for comment sent to his courtroom aide on Tuesday.

In the days after the Texas mifepristone ruling, two Democrats in Congress introduced a bill that would have mandated random case assignments and restored a practice that was put in place between 1937 and 1976, in which any lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a state or federal law was heard by a three-judge panel.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the bill’s Senate sponsor, also called on the Judicial Conference to make that change. “No single judge should have the power to make sweeping decisions that could harm millions of Americans,” he said. “If a decision will have national consequences, it should be heard by a panel of judges.”

Dallas Seavey won his record sixth Iditarod sled dog race on Tuesday, despite an eventful race that included a penalty for failing to properly gut a moose.

Seavey was cruising in the race last week near Skwentna, Alaska, when his dog team became entangled with a moose. Sledders in the race are permitted to carry firearms and Seavey used his to shoot and kill the moose. One of his dogs, Faloo, was critically injured in the encounter, but underwent two successful surgeries and was expected to survive.

Seavey’s problems were not over when he shot the moose. The ethics of the Iditarod race require that when a large animal like a moose or caribou is killed during the competition, its meat must be taken and distributed. So the sledder involved in the accident must stop and gut the animal.

Unfortunately for him, Seavey was judged not to have done so adequately. As a result, he was assessed a two-hour penalty. Nonetheless, he overcame that setback to win the race.

The Iditarod covers about 1,000 miles in Alaska from Anchorage to Nome. Seavey completed the race in nine days, two hours, and 16 minutes, crossing the burled arch finish line at 5:16 p.m. local time.

Seavey’s sixth win surpasses the five victories of Rick Swenson between 1977 and 1991.

Seavey, 37, raced in his first Iditarod in 2005, the day after he turned 18, making him the youngest musher ever to enter.

His first win came in 2012 when he was 25, and he also became the youngest winner ever. He won back-to-back-to-back races in 2014 to 2016, and added his record-tying win in 2021.

His father, Mitch, won the race three times, and his grandfather Dan has also participated in the race.

“This one was supposed to be hard,” Seavey said after crossing the finish line. “It had to be special, it had other be more than just a normal Iditarod. And for me, it was.”

A week after Justice Amy Coney Barrett chastised Justice Sonia Sotomayor for choosing “to amplify disagreement with stridency” in a Supreme Court decision on former President Donald J. Trump’s eligibility to hold office, the two women appeared together on Tuesday to discuss civics and civility.

They gave, for the most part, a familiar account of a collegial court whose members know how to disagree without being disagreeable.

“We don’t speak in a hot way at our conferences,” Justice Barrett said, referring to the private meetings at which the justices discuss cases. “We don’t raise our voices no matter how hot-button the case is.”

Justice Sotomayor, who usually gives a sunny description of relations between the justices, registered a partial dissent.

“Occasionally someone might come close to something that could be viewed as hurtful,” Justice Sotomayor said. When that happens, she said, a senior colleague will sometimes call the offending justice, suggesting an apology or other way of patching things up.

Similar interactions can happen if a draft opinion is too sharp, she said. “There is dialogue around that, an attempt to find a different expression,” she said.

Justice Sotomayor added, “So all of these things are ways to manage emotion without losing respect for one another and without losing an understanding that each of us is acting in good faith.”

Justice Barrett picked up the point, which may have resonated more strongly in the wake of her concurring opinion in last week’s case. It questioned the tone of a joint opinion from Justices Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, saying they had needlessly turned up the national temperature.

“I’m glad that Justice Sotomayor brought up that sometimes we do need to apologize because we are human,” Justice Barrett said. “And so sometimes you say something that comes across maybe in a way that you didn’t intend.”

The justices have norms to ensure collegiality, she added. They speak in order of seniority at their conferences, interruptions are not allowed and nobody speaks twice until everyone has spoken once.

The justices often have lunch together, in assigned seats. As it happens, Justice Barrett said, she sits across from Justice Sotomayor. The norms of discussions at conference, she added, mean that “you don’t feel guilty about looking at someone across the lunch table.”

Eric Liu, the chief executive of Citizen University, who interviewed the two justices, said the court’s norms sounded like “the rules of a really good preschool.”

Another analogy, Justice Barrett later said, was that the justices were part of an arranged marriage with no possibility of divorce.

Justice Sotomayor stressed that it is crucial to maintain good relations. “I may not have Amy in this case,” she said of a hypothetical one, “but I certainly will need her tomorrow on something else.”

Justice Barrett said that accommodations are sometimes possible.

“Our job is to say what we think the right answer is to the best of our ability,” she said. “So neither of us can compromise on that and the bottom line, but there’s a lot that we can compromise how we write opinions. You know, you have the ability to write an opinion more broadly or more narrowly.”

She added, “We all work very, very hard, down to like little word choices, oftentimes, down to the smallest word choices, to accommodate one another.”

Justice Sotomayor, 69, was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009. Justice Barrett, 52, was appointed by President Donald J. Trump in 2020.

The conversation took place at a forum on civics education at George Washington University. Civics education was a pet project of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who died last year.

Justice Barrett recalled something Justice O’Connor had said: “If you want to know what’s going on in America, then you can look at our docket and you can see some of the battles that are being waged through litigation are often reflective of the battles that are being waged in the society at large.”

Justice Barrett said the court strikes the right balance between openness and secrecy. “We are simultaneously the most transparent branch,” she said, adding that “you know exactly why we reached the decisions that we did because we make that transparent.”

“But then also we keep a great deal confidential, and I think that gives us the room to be able to deliberate and talk,” she said.

It is true that the court generally issues lengthy decisions in argued cases. But it often disposes of emergency applications on what critics call its shadow docket with no reasoning at all.

The Biden administration announced on Tuesday that it was sending up to $300 million in weapons to Ukraine, the first new aid package for the country since funding ran out in late December.

The package, pulled together from money that Army accountants cobbled from savings from contracts that came in under bid, includes air defense interceptors, artillery rounds and armor systems, senior defense officials said. Two U.S. officials said the package also includes an older version of the Army’s longer-range missile systems known as ATACMS, which can travel 100 miles.

It is a stopgap measure at best, the officials said, but Ukraine is in dire need of air defense systems in particular, as Russia has continued its bombardment of towns particularly in the east.

The makeshift solution would keep advancing Russian troops at bay for only a few weeks, one official said.

Announcing the aid package at the White House, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said that “Ukrainian troops have fought bravely, are fighting bravely throughout this war, but they are now forced to ration their ammunition under pressure on multiple fronts.”

He said the new package would “keep Ukraine’s guns firing for a period, but only a short period.” Mr. Sullivan called for Congress to pass a new Ukraine aid bill “as soon as possible.”

He said that Ukraine desperately needed the assistance to hold the line against Russian attacks, but that “it goes without saying this package does not displace and should not delay the critical need to pass the bipartisan national security bill.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in his overnight address, thanked “the United States and all Americans who value freedom” for their support of his country.

The Senate passed an emergency aid bill including $60.1 billion for Ukraine. But the measure faces an uncertain fate in the House of Representatives, where Republican leaders have refused to put the measure to a vote. While congressional officials say there is a critical mass of support for continuing to arm Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression, the Republican Party is increasingly turning away from its traditional hawkish posture and belief in projecting American power and democratic principles around the world.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana who has opposed aiding Ukraine, must navigate a handful of ultraconservative lawmakers who have said they will move to oust him if he allows a vote on Ukraine aid without stringent immigration measures attached.

On Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, urged Mr. Johnson to hold a vote on the Ukraine aid package.

“I want to encourage the speaker again to allow a vote,” he said.

For President Biden, who has led the way in calling for the West to stand up for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion and occupation, the issue has become an embarrassing one on the international stage.

The American political paralysis has led, Pentagon officials said, to critical shortages on the battlefields of Ukraine. As each day goes by without a fresh supply of munitions and artillery, and Ukrainian crews ration the shells they have, morale suffers.

“When Russian troops advance and its guns fire, Ukraine does not have enough ammunition to fire back; that’s costing terrain,” Mr. Sullivan said. “It’s costing lives and it’s costing us, the United States and the NATO alliance, strategically.”

Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration has sent more than $75 billion in cash and equipment to the country for its defense. Most of the aid has gone to Ukraine’s military operations, keeping its government running and addressing its humanitarian needs.

The money ran out in December, and Mr. Biden asked Congress for the authority to begin a new infusion of cash and equipment that only it can approve. But many Republicans object to pouring more taxpayer dollars into the conflict.

Senior intelligence officials warned on Monday that without additional American aid, Ukraine faced the prospect of continued battlefield losses as Russia uses a network of arms suppliers and increases its supply of technology from China.

In public testimony during the annual survey of worldwide threats facing the United States, the officials told Congress that any continued delay of U.S. aid would lead to additional territorial gains by Russia over the next year, the consequences of which would be felt in Europe and in the Pacific.

On Tuesday, Denmark also announced a new $340 million military aid package for Ukraine.

Constant Méheut contributed reporting.

Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated President Biden, on Tuesday fiercely defended the disparaging assessment of the president’s mental state included in his final report — and his decision not to charge Mr. Biden with a crime.

Mr. Hur, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about his polarizing 345-page report, cast himself as an impartial arbiter. He said he had expressed concerns about Mr. Biden’s memory because he needed to justify not bringing a case against Mr. Biden after some evidence showed that the president had willfully retained sensitive material from his vice presidency.

“I resolved to do the work as I did all my work for the department: fairly, thoroughly and professionally,” he said in his opening statement.

Mr. Hur, a registered Republican who has been slammed by Mr. Biden’s allies for including his politically damaging assessment of Mr. Biden’s memory, showed little emotion during the hearing, but reacted angrily when a Democrat suggested he had “smeared” the president to bolster Mr. Trump.

“Partisan politics played no part whatsoever in my work,” said Mr. Hur, 51, a former Trump Justice Department official whose appointment was lauded by some Democrats who praised his work as a prosecutor in Maryland.

About an hour before Mr. Hur testified, Democrats on the congressional panel released a lightly redacted transcript of the five-hour interview Mr. Hur and his team conducted with Mr. Biden. It offered a more nuanced portrayal than the special counsel’s damning description of the 81-year-old president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

While the 258-page transcript showed that on several occasions the president fumbled with dates and the sequence of events, he otherwise appeared clearheaded, with the kind of gaps in recollection not uncommon among people interviewed about events that transpired years earlier. But Mr. Biden did have difficulty recalling specific dates, most strikingly when he fumbled in remembering the day his son Beau — who succumbed to cancer in 2015 — died.

On Tuesday, it was Mr. Hur’s turn to answer tough questions.

For more than four enervating hours, he sat at the witness table as alternating Democrats and Republicans pelted him with angry questions, pausing only to berate one another, or to deliver high-volume partisan speeches as Mr. Hur perched on the edge of his chair.

The political dynamics of the hearing were basic, brutal and binary: Democrats defended Mr. Biden, a candidate many Americans see as too old, while Republicans tried to shore up Mr. Trump, hoping to minimize his indictment over the summer on charges he illegally retained documents and obstructed investigators.

The stakes of Tuesday’s hearing were high even as Mr. Biden gave a fiery defense of his presidency during his State of the Union speech last week that seemed to address some of the concerns about age and mental fitness raised by the special counsel.

Mr. Hur, who began by saying he would not comment beyond the contents of the report, offered little succor to either side.

He repeatedly refused to accept the Republican argument that Mr. Biden’s actions were comparable to the indictment against Mr. Trump in the Florida documents case. His report pointed to “several material distinctions,” including that Mr. Biden cooperated with the investigation into his handling of classified documents whereas Mr. Trump repeatedly resisted requests to return material from his time in office.

But Mr. Hur made a point of rejecting a suggestion by Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, that he had exonerated Mr. Biden, and he did little to mask his disapproval of Mr. Biden’s handling of sensitive materials that were found in several unsecured locations, including his garage in Delaware.

“I did not exonerate him; that word does not appear in the report,” Mr. Hur said, a line that is likely to be seized upon by Mr. Trump and his supporters in the coming weeks.

Democrats kicked off the hearing by playing a highlight reel of Mr. Trump’s own verbal miscues and memory lapses — and included a clip in which he said he did not remember saying he had a great memory.

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland , accused Republicans of focusing on Mr. Biden’s mental fitness, instead of Mr. Trump’s praise for authoritarian leaders and recent meeting with Victor Orban, the far-right leader of Hungary.

“It’s not a memory test for President Biden,” he said. “It’s a memory test for all of America. Do we remember fascism? Do we remember Nazism? Communism and totalitarianism?”

But Mr. Hur did not back down from the report’s characterization of the president.

When Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, accused Mr. Hur of choosing “a general pejorative” to describe Mr. Biden’s mental state, Mr. Hur shot back by saying he would not “shape” and “sanitize” his report for political purposes.

“You cannot tell me you are so naïve as to think your words would not have created a political firestorm,” said Mr. Schiff, one of the managers of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “You understood how they would be manipulated.”

Mr. Hur did not challenge a claim by Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that Mr. Biden had retained the documents to profit from a memoir he wrote after leaving office in 2017. In fact, the special counsel said he agreed with that “assessment.”

Yet he repeatedly refused to endorse Republican assertions that Mr. Biden would have been charged with a crime had he been able to remember his actions — and rejected their claims that his mishandling of documents was comparable to Mr. Trump’s.

When a Republican committee member asked Mr. Hur if his decision not to prosecute Mr. Biden created a new paradigm that made it acceptable to take “secrets” home, he dryly replied, “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Mr. Hur said that Mr. Garland, who has come under intense fire for picking him, did not pressure him to make changes to his report or request any changes.

Mr. Hur gave his testimony as a private citizen, not an employee of the Justice Department. As of Monday, he had resigned as special counsel and will be represented by a private lawyer, William A. Burck, according to a department spokesman, who did not explain Mr. Hur’s reason for doing so.

Mr. Burck, a former deputy counsel in the White House under George W. Bush who has deep networks in Republican Washington, sat behind Mr. Hur at the hearing.

The police chief in Uvalde, Texas, who was out of town during the school shooting that left 21 people dead in May 2022, announced on Tuesday that he would step down. His resignation is the latest fallout from the turmoil in law enforcement over the length of time it took for officers to confront the gunman.

The chief, Daniel Rodriguez, did not give a reason for his decision to resign.

His department and others that responded that day have come under criticism for the more than 70 minutes it took officers to enter the classrooms where the gunman was holed up with teachers and students. His announcement comes less than a week after an investigation by the city concluded that Uvalde officers who were on the scene acted in good faith and did not violate department policy.

Mr. Rodriguez, who has been the police chief since 2018, was in Arizona at the time of the shooting, but was in communication with the officer he had left in charge, Lt. Mariano Pargas Jr. Mr. Pargas resigned in November 2022 after 18 years on the force, and has since been re-elected as a county commissioner.

“After deep contemplation and consideration, I believe it is time for me to embrace a new chapter in my career,” Mr. Rodriguez said Tuesday in a letter announcing his resignation.

The mayor of Uvalde, Cody Smith, said the chief’s resignation would be effective on April 6. He said Homer Delgado, an assistant chief of police, would serve as interim police chief while the city embarked on a search for a new leader.

“Nothing is more important than the safety of our community, and we look forward to working together to identify the best candidate to serve the people of Uvalde,” Mr. Smith said in a statement.

On May 24, 2022, a teenage gunman, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, climbed a low fence and entered Robb Elementary School through an unlocked door. He unleashed a barrage of bullets, killing 19 children and two teachers and injuring 17 other people.

More than 370 officers from local, state and federal agencies gathered at the scene, but did not attempt to confront the gunman for more than an hour.

The city convened a special meeting last week to reveal results of a two-year investigation into the shooting. During the meeting, an investigator hired by the city — Jesse Prado, a retired detective from Austin — said his findings showed that while law enforcement made many documented mistakes that day, Mr. Pargas and the more than 20 other officers from the city force who responded had acted in good faith and did not break department protocol.

The city’s findings, included in a 182-page report released on Thursday, are the third major investigation into the sluggish police response. Two previous inquiries, one by a state committee and the other by the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded that the police response was marked by a series of failures in leadership, wrong decision-making and lack of training.

Other inquiries are pending. The local district attorney, Christina Mitchell, has convened a grand jury that is hearing testimony to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against any officers who responded that day. The Texas Department of Public Safety, which also sent officers to the scene, has yet to release the results of its inquiry.

In the days after the shooting, much of the blame for the slow police response centered on Pete Arredondo, the chief of the small school-district police department, who was considered by many to have been the incident commander. He was fired by the school district shortly afterward. The district later dismantled its entire police force, which consisted of five officers, and has hired new officers.

The Texas Department of Public Safety ousted at least two of the seven officers who were under investigation for their role in the response, including Sgt. Juan Maldonado and a Texas Ranger, Christopher Ryan Kindell.

Sheriff Ruben Nolasco of Uvalde County and Emmanuel Zamora, the county constable in Uvalde, have been criticized for their roles in the police response, and are still looking to hold on to their posts, which are elected. Sheriff Nolasco is headed for a primary runoff in May; Mr. Zamora won the Republican primary for his post on Tuesday.

Relatives of the victims have been demanding full accountability for the police response. Jesse Rizo, whose niece Jackie Cazares died in the shooting, said he hoped to see other officers fired or otherwise punished.

“At the end of the day, from the top all the way down, you know, these people have to be held accountable,” he said. As for Chief Rodriguez, he said, “His departure was long overdue.”