The Democrats' rotten, no good, very bad week not even counting the SCOTUS argument
But they respond with grace, class and humility................NOT
President Biden was in full throat in responding to the Special Counsel’s report, which found that he intentionally misappropriated classified documents, stored them carelessly in several places in his home (including in his garage), and shared them with a ghostwriter whipping up his memoirs, but that no charges would be brought in large part because a sympathetic jury would be likely to regard him as a kindly if doddering old man with memory problems — not the sort of fellow you’d want to send to jail.
The whole press conference is below. I’m not particularly recommending that you watch it, but for those interested and/or masochistic, here it is:
It’s been widely reported how the President confused Mexico and Egypt. I don’t want to make too much of that, though, since both are, after all, on the earth.
Still, Biden was in vintage form, as Factcheck noted in a long article that begins:
Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on his investigation of President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.” But in a press conference, Biden made several false or misleading claims concerning other details in that report.
“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” including “marked classified documents” about Afghanistan and handwritten notebooks Biden had kept, Hur’s report says. However, for several reasons Hur outlines, “we conclude that the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The report was released on Feb. 8, and Biden held a press conference that night.
Biden said the special counsel found “‘a shortage of evidence’ that I willfully retained classified materials,” calling news reports “about my willful retention of documents … just plain wrong.” The special counsel said the investigation “uncovered evidence [that] Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials,” but not enough evidence to convince a jury.
He falsely said none of the documents found in his possession was highly classified.
Biden claimed the special counsel “did not say” that Biden had shared secret information with the ghostwriter of his book. The report did say that.
Biden wrongly claimed that “all the stuff that was in my home was in filing cabinets that were either locked or able to be locked.” Some material was in unlocked drawers and in a box in the garage, the report says.
The president condemned claims in the report about his “diminished faculties and faulty memory,” saying they had “no place in this report.” Hur said he included it as part of his argument that it would be hard to convince a jury that Biden had acted “willfully” to break the law.
I report these details, not because there’s anything new about Biden’s making stuff up, but simply because other outlets have said only that Biden was “angry” or “firey,” while there is actually more to it than that.
The more interesting part of the Democrats’ reaction has been from surrogates, who slammed the amount of detail as a politically-motivated gutter-punch that had no place in the Special Counsel’s findings. As related by Politico:
“Mr. Hur seems to have gone beyond the limits of what he can write by adding what appear to be simply unnecessary comments about the president’s age and memory, especially the gratuitously bold assertion about forgetting when his son passed,” said Gene Rossi, a former federal prosecutor.
Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, agreed.
“The language that Hur used, I thought, was remarkable and unfortunate,” Gorelick said. “I think he could have listed his reasons for not recommending a charge or not charging without that kind of gratuitous slam.”
Other critics have gone farther, saying that, in the ordinary case when the decision is made not to file charges, the prosecutor just closes the book and makes no comment at all, lest he unfairly tarnish those he has found “innocent.”
And that’s true, but with two caveats. First, Hur never found that Biden is “innocent” in the sense any normal person would understand it to mean. To the contrary, he found that Biden did exactly what it was widely reported that he did, but that a prosecution should not be brought because (a) Biden was cooperative with the investigation and (b) it was problematic at best that a jury, seeing Biden’s age, confusion and forgetfulness, would conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the misappropriation was “willful” in the criminal sense.
The second reason that Hur was fully within bounds in going into detail about Biden’s dilapidated mental state takes root in the nature of Special Counsel investigations. Almost by definition, they are high profile inquiries into alleged wrongdoing at very high levels. And this one was higher profile than most, given that former President Trump was indicted by a different Special Counsel for doing almost exactly the same thing. To say that the public has a strong interest in knowing the specifics of why prosecutors used a B-52 on Donald Trump but a crop duster on Joe Biden has to be the understatement of the year. The explanation of the public’s interest isn’t hard to understand.
“Sad to say, we also regularly find ourselves presented with situations where the legitimacy of a prosecutor’s decision not to charge a politician, police officer or other public figure turns on the explanation [the prospective defendant] gives,” said Daniel Richman, [once a DOJ lawyer and] now a professor at Columbia University. “The norm of never going beyond a simple ‘no’ will often not cut it, especially when a declination will usually be spun as a full exoneration or a whitewash, and the possibility of congressional hearings looms large.”
Oh, and one other thing. Special Counsel Hur has been lambasted, not just for the detail in which he described Mr. Biden’s mental lapses (apparently including being unable to recall the years in which he served as Vice President), but for making his report public.
Only one thing. He didn’t make it public. Merrick Garland did.
Technically, the report from special counsel Robert Hur on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents is considered confidential under DOJ rules. Hur even labeled it as such.
In practice, though, burying or censoring the report would have been untenable, former Justice Department leaders say.
They described a high-stakes calculus for both Garland and Hur informed by previous politically sensitive investigations: Special counsel reports have always been made public in recent years, and Garland would have been slammed by Republicans and the press if he tried to keep this one under wraps.
Finally for now, Hur and DOJ have been slammed by some of the President’s allies for making the report, laden as it is with political implications, available when at least in theory (and typically in practice for routine criminal cases), the matter is simply and quietly closed after a no-indictment conclusion is reached.
This complaint got me to thinking if I could remember any other Special Counsel report that got splashed all over the networks and the papers after the Special Counsel concluded that no prosecutable case existed.
Oh! Yes! Now that you mention it……….
In 2019, [Bill] Barr’s decision to release the largely unredacted report of special counsel Robert Mueller helped paint a damaging picture of Donald Trump’s embrace of Russian interference in the 2016 election, despite Mueller’s decision not to recommend criminal charges.
My guess is that, even if your memory is as bad as Joe Biden’s, you can remember what an extravaganza that was. What you might not be able to remember — I sure can’t — was any Democrat who complained about it.