The New York Times is having a really bad day, meaning that things are looking up for America.
After this morning’s disastrous Supreme Court argument, which virtually every observer thinks is going to result in a lopsided win for Trump and a big-time bench-slap to the all-Democrat majority in the Colorado Supreme Court that wanted to disenfranchise roughly half the electorate by barring Trump from appearing on the ballot, this afternoon brought its own news. At first blush, the news is good for Joe Biden (no charges for his garage special with misappropriated classified documents), but you don’t have to look far to see that, in reality, it is, as the Times called it, “a political nightmare”:
The special counsel investigating President Biden’s handling of classified material after leaving the vice presidency in 2017 concluded in a report released today that “no criminal charges are warranted.”
Robert Hur, the special counsel, found that Biden had “willfully” retained and disclosed some sensitive material, including notebooks with entries “implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.” Hur criticized the president for sharing some of the classified information with a ghostwriter, but added that the evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
For Biden, Hur’s decision not to prosecute was a long-awaited legal exoneration, but the special counsel’s report still turned out to be a political nightmare. In passages explaining his reasons not to pursue a trial, Hur said that Biden had presented himself as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and described interviews in which Biden could not recall when he served as vice president or what year his son Beau Biden died….
“Privately, several Democratic strategists expressed deep concern about how the report depicted the president and how that will be used in a campaign,” our political correspondent Maggie Haberman said.
Yes, well, now that you mention it, a campaign ad does suggest itself:
An attractive young woman dressed in Army combat fatigues and hunkering down in the desert looks into the camera and says, “Joe Biden probably does well as Grandpa. But in facing off against Iran, Hamas, and America’s and the West’s other bloodthirsty enemies around the world, I don’t want Grandpa. And I sure don’t want someone who got American soldiers like me killed because of his turn-tail retreat in Afghanistan, or his weakness in failing to deter deadly rocket attacks on our people in the Middle East. Grandpa is fine for Christmas dinner, but for the world I face, and America faces, we need someone with the strength, energy, and focus that Joe Biden, at his age, simply doesn’t have. For me and for us, it’s a matter of life and death.”
OK, RNC, there you are. No charge. I do this stuff for fun.
The full paragraph in Special Counsel Hur’s report, from which the Times takes only a brief excerpt, is damning, both politically and legally:
"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 from 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."
Translation for legal purposes: It’s not that the evidence isn’t there. He did it and he did it intentionally. It’s that juries don’t like sending doddering old men to jail. And they don’t, but does the country want to send that same doddering old man into the Oval Office, with all its power, and all its demands?
Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a reason the Democrats are so determined to make sure the ballot contains only the name of their candidate.
But wait, there’s more. Biden’s response to Hur’s report sounds like something taken right out of the script they write for — you guessed it! — Donald Trump.
Enter the New York Times again. It’s article is a more than revealing:
President Biden angrily hit back against a special counsel’s report on his handling of classified documents on Thursday, saying that the report unfairly raised questions about his age and memory. He lashed out at the suggestion that he had forgotten the date of his son’s death.
“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Mr. Biden said during a hastily called news conference on Thursday night.
Did someone say that The Donald is the thin-skinned fellow with a mean streak?
The remarks from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House came just hours after a special counsel cleared him of criminal charges in the handling of classified documents but described him as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
Mr. Biden used the opportunity to respond directly to the report from Robert K. Hur, the special counsel in the documents case. He denied that he had shared classified information with his ghostwriter, a critical allegation in the report. He said that a memo on Afghanistan that he wrote to President Barack Obama that he shared should have been considered simply “private.”
He blamed his staff for any mistakes that were made in handling classified documents, saying “I take responsibility for not having seen exactly what my staff was doing.”
Biden, with all the bolstering from the MSM that for Trump has been years of bitter targeting, folds like the proverbial house of cards when the pressure gets turned up even slightly. Blaming the people you hire — while absurdly pretending not to — is the weakest, lamest game in town. And no, it wasn’t any better when Trump, for no reason beyond pique, blasted Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr for doing their jobs. But what’s sauce for the goose……….
Later in the questioning from reporters, Mr. Biden confused the presidents of Mexico and Egypt, making exactly the kind of mistake that his staff would have wanted him to avoid at a time when his mental acuity is being questioned.
This is almost a carbon copy of the occasion not long ago when Biden said he recently met with “Mitterand from Germany.” Mitterand was President of France between 1981 and 1995. He died 28 years ago.
Still, when a reporter asked him why he should not step aside given the concerns about his age, Mr. Biden said that he was the most qualified person in the country to be president and he should finish the job he started.
Let me just guess that essentially everyone reading this has more of what it takes to be President than, at this point, Joe Biden does.
On the strictly legal front, the decision to give Biden a walk for conduct similar to that for which Trump was indicted obviously raises its own issues. Inscribed above the Supreme Court are the words, “Equal Justice Under Law.” The disparate treatment accorded our two presidential candidates by the Justice Department only one of them controls is certain to breed the kind of cynicism that, at great cost to our civic faith, feeds a corrosive distrust of our institutions it will be hard to survive. My discussion of that, however, will have to await a future post. For now, I’m having too much fun.
To Doug and CjB,
We're in a rotten political situation none of us created or wants. It's ominous, you bet, and it's hard to see a way out. Still, I'm largely the impish kid I was in seventh grade, and in its way it tickles me pink to watch our Ever So Pompous opponents discover, in a way their leading mouthpiece itself can no longer deny, that they've embraced a sourpuss version of Mr. MaGoo. It's a scary version of karma, but to an impish kid, a satisfying one (as long as I can keep myself from thinking too often about where all this is headed).
Biden took the documents. He wasn't confused or demented when he did it. He didn't have the authority to take the documents. He knew that he was breaking the law. End of story.