The President sarcastically responded "my memory is so bad I let you speak."
What in the name of the Almighty was he talking about? No one laughed because, obviously, it was neither funny nor clever. And it made no sense.
Biden was responding to yesterday's release of the Special Counsel, who has investigated the classified documents found in the President's Delaware home (garage, offices, and basement den) and his office at Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. in December of 2022 and the following month. Robert (not Ben) Hur, appointed to the position by Attorney General Merrick Garland, had served as US Attorney in Maryland during the Trump administration. Recommending that Biden not be prosecuted
"It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness," Hur wrote. In the report, he said that during interviews Biden couldn't remember when he was vice president, and had to ask when his first term ended and began. The report added that Biden did not remember, "even within several years," when his son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015.
Still, Democratic Party operatives were anxious to spin furiously:
Let's be clear--the special counsel isn't a dummy and we should be very careful not to take the bait after Comey pulled this in 2016. Hur, a lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn't have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically.
— Jim Messina (@Messina2012) February 8, 2024
This matter is substantively, significantly different than Comey/Clinton. Hur is not the Attorney General, but a special counsel who was given the task of investigating the retention of documents and making a recommendation to the Attorney General. He
"uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified information after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen," the report said.
"These materials included (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden's handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods," said the report.
The FBI reviewed 33,000 Clinton emails individually and found only three emails- later corrected to one- which contained a lower-case "c" in the middle of a paragraph. Not even classification experts would recognize that as "classified" without a header which would immediately expose the report as classified.
Nonetheless, Comey announced to the nation on July 5, 2016 that "Hillary Clinton and her colleagues" were "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information." As of that date, every Democratic primary (or caucus) had been held and Mrs. Clinton already had, safely, declared herself winner of the nomination. She was the presumptive- and certain- Democratic nominee. Whether or not there was interest, there no longer was the opportunity for any primary voter to change his or her vote.
By contrast, this is only January and only one
party-sanctioned primary (South Carolina) has been held. There is still plenty
of time to prevent the Hur report from having a significant effect on the
general election- if the candidate is not Joe Biden.
He has mistaken Mexico for Egypt and the deceased Helmut Kohl for Angela Merkel, failed to recall when he became Vice-President or vacated the office, confused the war in Ukraine and Iraq, forgotten the year of death of the beloved son he often refers to with great pride... and more. It doesn't suffice that he will be running against Agent of the Devil Donald Trump, with his own, severe, cognitive problems.
Opinions of Donald Trump are largely baked-in. Therefore, if the President's condition gets progressively worse- as is likely- and Trump's condition also declines, voters will be alarmed only by Biden's deterioration. Moreover, in the unlikely event Biden is re-elected, it he probably would not be able to finish out his second term, either through death or incapacitation. And given the 25th Amendment, that would be a tragedy.
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