Special Counsel Robert Hur, as charged by the Department of Justice, released his report on Thursday that 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 are 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.”
While the U.S. corporate press has long abandoned any pretense of objectivity when it comes to the nation’s politics, another historical comparison would be apt to highlight the absurd double standard when it comes to invoking the 25th amendment as a pretext to remove a president from office.
When Donald Trump was in the White House, the press would from time to time raise the possibility of removing the president from office under the pretext of the 25th amendment.
The 25th Amendment, states, among other things that, “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”
Not a murmur from the press about the constitutional amendment, however, hastily drafted and ratified in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, has been forthcoming despite a number of concerning gaffes from President Biden highly suggestive of a rapidly deteriorating mental condition that renders him unfit for the nation’s highest office.
At the end of former President Ronald Reagan’s second term, his aides mulled over the possibility of removing the aging and declining leader from office.
“The president was acting strangely. In the wake of a scandal about his illegal dealings with foreign powers, White House aides felt he was so “inattentive and inept” that a memo sent to the chief of staff raised the prospect of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office,” History.com recalls.
“The president was Ronald Reagan, who was dealing with fallout from the Iran-Contra scandal,” the story added. “His chief of staff ultimately dismissed the possibility of using the 25th Amendment to remove him, but the incident is one of the few cases in American history in which White House staff seriously suggested it as an option for removing a president from office, based on his ability to perform the job.”
The 25th amendment’s invocation as a pretext to remove a sitting president appears to be highly selective, indeed. It is enough to make one question whether the press cares more about the mental and physical fitness of the sitting president than his party affiliation.
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