You just can’t make this stuff up. I know I keep saying that, but come on. How much can one blogging lawyer be expected to take? CNN ran the story yesterday headlined, “
Special counsel report concludes Biden willfully retained classified information but will not face charges.”
Useless special counsel and obedient lapdog Robert Hur issued his vast, overwritten, 345-page report yesterday, and — this will shock you — he declined to prosecute Joe Biden for doing exactly the same thing Trump is being prosecuted for doing, keeping classified documents after he left office, except worse, because Biden wasn’t even the President at the time. Critically, the President has the power to declassify at will, and as Hur’s report noted, Congressional secrecy statutes don’t even apply to the President.
But they do apply to the
vice president.
Trump carefully protected his documents in a video-monitored, Secret Service-protected safe room at Mar-a-Lago, a private club with layers and layers of security. Biden carelessly stacked his documents in some ripped banker’s boxes out in the garage at a house “rented” to his drug-addled son, Hunter, next to a pile of junk. And in other even less-secure places.
Here’s how the Report’s introduction described Biden’s classified documents handling “procedure”:
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 (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) 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.
We also expect many jurors to be struck by the place where the Afghanistan documents were ultimately found in Mr. Biden's Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.
One of the most memorable parts of Hur’s report, even if not legally significant, was his description of Biden as essentially being an Alzheimer’s patient. The main reason Hur astoundingly offered for not prosecuting Biden is that a jury would have found the former vice president to be a sympathetic witness as a
frail elderly person with severe memory loss:
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.
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.
They had to split hairs
somehow. Team Biden’s challenge was to somehow distinguish between what Biden did and what Trump did, so they can keep prosecuting Trump while letting Biden wander off. They picked possibly the dumbest distinction, that Biden was too stupid, old, and careless to know that what he was doing was wrong.
Don’t be fooled, this strategy of incompetence is cunningly aimed at a legitimate legal distinction: the records statute at issue requires the government to prove “willfulness.”
Hur’s theory, stated quite plainly in his report, is that Biden is guilty, no question, but
a jury won’t believe that someone as out-of-contact with reality as Biden could have
willfully violated the classified records statute. Hur repeatedly said he wasn’t taking a position on whether Biden was willful or not; he seems to think Biden was willful, even questioning whether Biden might have deliberately staged the documents in his garage, and later cooperated with the FBI, to support a fake ‘carelessness’ or ‘forgetfulness’ defense.
But having carefully weighed all the pro’s and con’s, and being a good little doggy, Special Prosecutor Hur concluded that since he — himself — thought a jury would probably just sympathize with a frail elderly dementia patient like Biden, the government wouldn’t reliably be able to prove willfulness. So Hur decided not to prosecute. Case closed.
Biden obviously enjoys the benefits of the First Class legal system, and Trump is back in coach with the rest of us. When the democrats bleat that “no one is above the law,” they mean
except for people in First Class.
Hur’s reasoning was particularly moronic because the ‘crime’ occurred at the instant the documents were illegally retained — the day Biden left office as vice-president. The real difference between the two cases is not whether Trump “failed to cooperate” and Biden “cooperated,” because those are things that happened or didn’t happen
long after the alleged crimes were committed (to the extent crimes were committed). The
real difference is that Trump was President and Biden was only-vice president, and there are worlds of difference between those two jobs under the Constitution and other applicable law.
Hur is also wrong on willfulness issue. The question isn’t whether Joe Biden has the cognitive ability to willfully violate the records statute
today, when he has only three firing neurons left. The question is whether Joe Biden had the cognitive ability to willfully violate the records statute
at the time the crime was committed. That’s what a jury would have to decide, and likely Biden wouldn’t even testify, since most criminal defendants don’t.
Even if Biden did testify, a jury might reasonably conclude Biden was faking. After all, who would believe the President of the United States is really a dementia patient? Please. Any decent prosecutor could make that argument.
Hur is obviously not a decent prosecutor.
All in all, it was the worst possible time to publish the Hur report’s strategic limited hangout claiming Biden’s lack of mental capacity, what with the Tucker-Putin interview happening at the same time. The contrast between Putin — alert, intelligent, focused — and Biden — so forgetful a jury would never convict him — is literally breathtaking.
The Hur report raises serious questions about the election. I have become very skeptical about Democrats’ sincerity in pretending to run Joe Biden as their candidate. Try to imagine what Trump could do just in terms of devastating campaign ads based on the Hur report’s comments about Biden’s lack of mental capacity. A ten-year-old could make that ad.
I’ll end with this headline, picture, and paragraph from Politico’s article last night. Here’s the bizarre headline:
Here’s the unflattering photo they put right under that headline:
And here’s the one tricksy paragraph they slipped into the story that set the stage:
Haha! I mean, come
on. At this point, they’re practically
carrying Biden down to the bus depot so they can throw him under the wheels.
Carlson-Putin interview dents the Proxy War; Special Counsel torpedoes Biden; attacks on Moscow after interview; Zelensky's replacement general butchers morale; Supreme Court favors Trump; and more.
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