In the last couple of days there has been concerning news come out of the US of A. The Republican appointed to investigate the legality of Joe Biden’s retention of official records has concluded that he should not be charged.
The justification is important.
The investigator, Robert Hur, who is a Republican, has concluded that Biden wilfully retained classified documents but that he was “well-intentioned, but sometimes hapless and forgetful” and that a prosecution was not justified because “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”.
This is the most startling and damaging attack by someone in a nominally independent position since former FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI was reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and whether they involved the unlawful removal and retention of classified documents eleven days before the 2016 Presidential election. That event is considered to be one of the reasons that Donald Trump won that election.
Biden has responded by claiming that Hur is wrong. From Radio New Zealand:
The White House on Friday blasted a report from a Department of Justice special counsel that suggested President Joe Biden was suffering memory lapses, and Vice President Kamala Harris called the report “clearly politically motivated”.
The report from Special Counsel Robert Hur, a former US attorney in Maryland during Republican Donald Trump’s administration, has prompted an election-year brawl and renewed questions about Biden’s advanced age. This week Biden, 81, mixed up the names of several world leaders.
Ian Sams, spokesperson for the White House legal counsel’s office, joined press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in the White House briefing room to criticize Hur’s report and raise questions about his motivation.
Hur said in a report released on Thursday that he chose not to bring criminal charges following a 15-month investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents because the president cooperated.
Hur said Biden would be difficult to convict and described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who was not able to recall to investigators when his son, Beau Biden, died.
“We don’t think that part of the report lives in reality,” Jean-Pierre said.
“We just reject that this is true,” Sams said.
Harris rushed to Biden’s defence when asked about the issue after a White House appearance.
“The way that the president’s demeanour in that report was characterised could not be more wrong on the facts and [is] clearly politically motivated,” she said, according to a pool report.
The right are rejoicing in the news. On the left there is some questioning of Hur’s background and motivation.
Trump himself has problems with his memory. He recently confused Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Hayley, said that Hungarian leader Viktor Orban was the leader of Turkey, famously said that the current leader of the US is Barak Obama.
Dana Milbank has this fascinating description of Trump at a recent meeting:
I went to Trump’s rally on Saturday night in Manchester, where he didn’t address the Haley-Pelosi mix-up but assured his supporters that he “took a cognitive test” and “I aced it.” He has previously boasted of his ability to identify an image of a “whale” on said assessment, but, as The Post’s Ashley Parker and Dan Diamond pointed out, there is no such marine mammal on any version of the test. (Maybe he was being “sarcastic” about the whale, too.) But I listened carefully to Trump that night — no easy feat because he went on for 100 minutes — and noticed that, even though his text was fed to him through a teleprompter, he told many of the same stories over and over again, repeating some lines almost word for word in the same speech, with no apparent awareness that he had done so.Unlike so much of what Trump does, his memory lapses aren’t disqualifying — only hypocritical. Trump routinely calls President Biden, 81, “cognitively impaired,” but the 77-year-old Trump seems also to have lost a step. He mangles names and words — a visiting foreign dignitary becomes a “foreign dignity” — and occasionally just talks nonsense.
Trump has other problems. He is facing multiple charges relating to attempts to overthrow the Presidential and Georgia election result and possession of classified documents as well as falsifying business records, there are sustained court applications to remove him from the ballot for insurrection, and he has just lost a defamation law suit to E Jean Carroll for calling her a liar when she accused him of sexual assault.Many in the news media don’t make much of this; while they focus on Biden’s mental acuity, in Trump’s case they rightly focus more on his authoritarian outbursts and gratuitous racism. Last week, for example, he bastardized Haley’s Indian name and falsely suggested she’s disqualified from the presidency because her parents weren’t citizens.
In fairness, the Trump of four and eight years ago was also plenty erratic. But a closer look at his public performances — his courtroom outbursts and on the stump — suggests the very stable genius is off his game. He’s propped up by a very professional campaign, which he didn’t have before, and more insulated from questions and spontaneous exchanges. Yet he’s still saying and doing the sort of things that, had Biden done them, Republicans would cry: dementia!
You would think that in normal times any of these events would rule out any chance of him being elected President. But the polls are already neck and neck.
And apart from Biden’s cognition issues he has some pretty solid achievements. The US economy has added 13 million jobs during his tenure, growth is strong and ahead of the rest of the Western World, inflation is down as is debt.
In a country where culture wars dominate and whole communities with deeply held Christian beliefs can think of Trump as some sort of saviour rational discussions about the merits of governance do not count.
The election is still 9 months away. There must be a chance that through health or legal issues one or both candidates will drop out. The rest of the world will be watching events intently.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress