Special Counsel Robert Hur has released his report on Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. I don’t say “alleged” mishandling, because the second paragraph of the report states the following:
Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. These materials included marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods. FBI agents recovered these materials from the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home.
If you have any familiarity with the way “justice” is administered in the former United States these days, you will know that this would be more than enough to bring charges against any member of the Deplorable faction — or, in the case of a sitting president, would immediately trigger a resolution to impeach.
Ha! That won’t happen, of course. But what’s interesting is one of the reasons Mr. Hur gives for declining to prosecute. After referring to Biden’s “severely limited” memory, and “limited precision and recall”, the summary goes on to say:
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.
Referring to Biden’s collaboration with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer on Biden’s two memoirs, we read:
Mr. Biden’s memory also appeared to have significant limitations — both at the time he spoke to Zwonitzer in 2017, as evidenced by their recorded conversations, and today, as evidenced by his recorded interview with our office. Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.
Further on:
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.
In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall.
Okay, so Biden won’t be prosecuted for any of this. (Did any of you imagine for a moment that he would be?) But what’s key here is that the Democratic Party and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) have spent long years assuring us, despite the evidence of our own eyes and ears, that Joe Biden’s cognitive faculties were still in good working order. This report makes that position indefensible.
If this weren’t ghastly enough, in the wake of this report Mr. Biden gave a triumphal presser last night, in which he tried to spike the ball. Insisting that his memory is fine, he then went on to say that he had persuaded the president of Mexico to open its border with Gaza.
The question is now inescapable: if Biden’s mental faculties — which were famously unimpressive even in his prime — had “significant limitations” even in 2017, what kind of shape will they be in by the end of a four-year term that won’t even begin until nearly a year from now? If he isn’t even fit to stand trial, how can he possibly be fit to be re-elected as president? There is no simply way forward here, even for the current administration’s staunchest defenders.
What does this mean? If Biden is already manifestly incompetent to hold the nation’s highest office — especially at a time of accelerating tension and chaos both at home and abroad — there is zero chance, even with all hands on deck for election-rigging and propaganda operations, that he will be re-elected. If it is impossible for him to be re-elected, then he will have to be put aside, and the people in charge will have to find some other plan for the coming election.
What will that be? I don’t know. Kamala Harris may ascend briefly to the Oval Office, God help us, but it’s hard to imagine that she has any political future beyond this year. Perhaps Michelle Obama will be thrust forward, although I still think that won’t happen either. Who else have the Democrats got? Gavin Newsom? Gretchen Whitmer? Pete Buttigieg? A rehabilitated Andrew Cuomo? That’s a pretty thin bench. Al Sharpton?
Faced with this grim prospect, no doubt there is now an even-more-intense focus in the halls of power on the only other way to level the field: the neutralization, by whatever means necessary, of Donald Trump. (I hope he is beefing up his personal security.) We may also see some titanic upheaval, some sort of “black swan” event that changes the rules altogether.
As of today, though, I think I can say with high confidence that, whatever else may happen, Joe Biden will not be the Democrat nominee.