Former First Lady Hillary Clinton says President Biden’s age is a “legitimate” campaign issue, despite the commander-in-chief facing criticism in the wake of a damning special counsel report accusing him of being senile.
“I talked to people in the White House all the time, and you know, they know it’s an issue, but as I like to say, ‘look, it’s a legitimate issue,’” Clinton told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner. “It’s a legitimate issue for [ex-President Donald] Trump who’s only three years younger, right? So it’s an issue.”
The former Democratic presidential nominee and secretary of state also stated during the interview that while Biden and Trump may struggle to connect with younger voters, the president could underline his credentials as a “experienced” leader.
“I think Biden also should lean into the fact that he’s experienced and that experience is not just in the political arena,” she said. “It’s like, the stuff of, you know, human experience, character, wisdom.”
“I think he should be willing to really pull that out … and I think he should kid more about it.”
According to a recent NBC News poll, 76% of respondents are afraid that Biden, 81, is not mentally prepared to serve a second term.
Special counsel Robert Hur’s damning report, released Thursday, concluded that Biden was too senile to face prosecution for his improper possession of confidential papers.
The report found that Joe Biden “willfully” retained and disclosed highly classified materials while a private citizen, including documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and other sensitive national security matters, but no criminal charges were ‘warranted’ against him or anyone else.
Beyond Joe Biden’s unlawful retention and disclosure of highly classified information as a private citizen, Hur’s report details mortifying example of the current president’s lack of recall about events, including when he was vice president.
Hur’s report discusses an incident regarding classified information on the Afghan War and his discussions with a ghostwriter for his autobiography.
“In addition. Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully-that is, with intent to break the law-as the statute requires.”
The Justice department decided not to give much weight to Biden’s words due to his lack of memory recall.
“Given Mr. Biden’s limited precision and recall during his interviews with his ghostwriter and with our office, jurors may hesitate to place too much evidentiary weight on a single eight-word utterance to his ghostwriter about finding classified documents in Virginia, in the absence of other, more direct evidence. We searched for such additional evidence and found it wanting. In particular, no witness, photo, email, text message, or any other evidence conclusively places the Afghanistan documents at the Virginia home in 2017.”
Thus, the Special Counsel’s attorneys did not recommend charges, in part, because they deem that Biden might cut a sympathetic figure due to his frailty and senility.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. 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. We conclude the evidence is not sufficient to convict, and we decline to recommend prosecution of Mr. Biden for his retention of the classified Afghanistan documents.”
This is, however, on its face, a more egregious offense than any facing Joe Biden’s election rival Donald Trump in his own classified documents case.
The worst passage from Hur’s report follows below:
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.”
While Joe Biden has struggled with memory throughout his presidency, often mixing up persons and places, he is now recalling events that didn’t even happen with world leaders who have long been dead.
During a fundraiser on Wednesday at the home of Maureen White, whose husband Steven Rattner manages billionaire former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s fortune, Biden referenced the deceased German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
“I showed up … and I sat down and said, ‘America’s back,’ and [French President Emmanuel] Macron looked at me and said, ‘For how long?’ How long? Not a joke,” Biden recalled, according to a pool report.
“Helmut Kohl said, ‘Joe, what would you think if you picked up the phone and picked up the paper tomorrow and learned in the London Times, on the front page, that 1,000 people stormed the Parliament, broke down the doors of the House of Commons and killed 2 bobbies in the process … trying to stop the election of a prime minister?’” he added.
U.S. President Joe Biden also told a nearly identical anecdote in Las Vegas that included long-deceased French leader François Mitterrand, who was in office from 1981 to 1995 and died in 1996, while confusing the nations of Germany and France.
“Right after I was elected, I went to a G7 meeting in southern England. And I sat down and said, ‘America is back!’ and Mitterand from Germany — I mean France — looked at me and said, ‘How long you back for?’” Biden retold.
The Democrat-supporting establishment press did its best to cover for the now-perpetually disoriented president — Politico calling the concerning mix-up a mere “slip of the tongue” — but Biden has now repeated the same mistake three times within a week.
The New York Post reports that Biden told the same story at a “stop at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel near Columbus Circle, for an event hosted by Dr. Ramon Tallaj, chairman of the nonprofit SOMOS Community Care and a member of Mayor Eric Adams’s COVID-19 recovery task force,” except this version featured the deceased “Helmut Kohl of Germany.”
The U.S. corporate press has long abandoned any pretense of objectivity when it comes to the nation’s politics. Thus, airing Hillary Clinton’s opinion on the matter is a signal that the Democratic Party establishment considers Joe Biden to be a liability.
Thus, Joe Biden’s days as a Democratic presidential candidate may indeed be numbered.
However, Biden’s mental decline is now so serious that the 25th amendment may have to be considered as a pretext to remove the president from office.
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