This cannot be happening.
It’s Hillary’s e-mail all over again, and nobody is more complicit in the coming disaster than the New York Times (well, nobody except asshole Special Counsel Robert K. Hur). Look at this shit:
And why is it, dear editorial staff of The Paper of Record, that Biden’s age seems to matter more than Trump’s, and Biden’s one gaffe of saying “Mexico” instead of “Egypt” matters so much more than the aphasic word salad pouring out of Donald’s flapping yap every goddam day? Geez, how come? Do you suppose it’s because you keep harping on it while amplifying ad nauseam the improper and gratuitous editorializing of a snarky report authored by a Republican hack who ought to be fired for misconduct? Serious question: are you guys journalists, or what? If all I was after was the witless parroting of Republican talking points, I’d ditch my expensive subscription and rely on whatever the Russian trolls want to spoon-feed me on Facebook, which, come to think of it, I probably should.
This all started when people on Biden’s team self-reported that they’d found some classified material he’d kept in his possession after leaving the Vice Presidency, and cooperated fully in returning it to the national archives. A lot of it was in the form of Biden’s own hand-written notes, which he’d kept with the aim of writing his memoirs (and it does look like Joe was pretty sloppy about what he kept and how he kept it). A.G. Merrick Garland, fair and balanced to a fault like always, figured this looked just enough like Donald’s mass theft of classified material that he’d better appoint a special counsel to look into it and make a report, and then, being Garland, and still wishing for nothing more desperately than to make the Justice Department appear scrupulously impartial – as if the Republicans and their media stooges could ever be appeased on that score – he appointed a Republican with an axe to grind to be the investigator. Enter Robert Hur, 2024’s iteration of James Comey.
It was Hur’s job to make one decision, and one only, after a thorough investigation: to recommend criminal charges or not. That’s it. That’s all he should have had to say about his own thoughts and opinions on the matter. Instead, he released a 300+ page report full of snide colour commentary and unprofessional asides challenging both the President’s mental capacity and his personal character. From the Washington Post:
Special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report, while concluding that criminal charges were not merited for Biden’s careless handling of classified documents, painted a devastating portrait of an 81-year-old president whose age has become a central issue in his reelection campaign, saying his memory was “significantly limited” and that he had “limited precision and recall.” One reason prosecutors concluded they would have trouble pursuing a case was that a jury might see Biden as an appealing — if forgetful — senior citizen.
“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,” the prosecutors wrote in their report released Thursday. “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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/08/biden-memory-special-counsel-report-robert-hur
To begin with, this is quite an idiotic bit of legal reasoning. Biden’s current memory is completely irrelevant to whether he once possessed the requisite “mental state of willfulness” to ground criminal charges for conduct that occurred years in the past. More to the point, this sort of thinking out loud has no place in such a report. Tell us the facts, state whether you think charges should be brought based on the evidence, and only the evidence, then shut the fuck up. Instead, Hur decided to pull a Comey and recite his own opinions, and that’s against policy. The Justice Department speaks only through its charging decisions. Every lawyer that works there knows that perfectly well. Why Comey forgot all about that in 2016 when he decided to trash Hillary remains hard to comprehend, but Hur’s motivations seem far less inscrutable. This was a political hit job, plain and simple, and now look: the media can talk about nothing else.
Just listen to what the report says within its first couple of pages before getting to the bit about Biden being an “elderly man with a poor memory” upon whom any jury would probably take pity (my emphasis added):
The classified documents and other materials recovered in this case spanned Mr. Biden’s career in national public life. During that career, Mr. Biden has long seen himself as a historic figure. Elected to the Senate at age twenty-nine, he considered running for president as early as 1980 and did so in 1988, 2008, and 2020. He believed his record during decades in the Senate made him worthy of the presidency, and he collected papers and artifacts related to significant issues and events in his career. He used these materials to write memoirs published in 2007 and 2017, to document his legacy, and to cite as evidence that he was a man of presidential timber...
Translation: Joe Biden walked off with a bunch of classified shit because he’s a vain old bastard desperate to make the erroneous case that he had what it took to be President (as if), but what can we do now, he’s just a doddering old fool who can’t remember his own middle name.
Even the reporting on Biden’s “willful” retention of classified material is distorted and incorrect, partly because of Hur’s own framing of the issue. The headlines make it sound as if Hur found evidence of criminality. He didn’t. As Andrew Weissmann notes:
The Special Counsel Robert Hur report has been grossly mischaracterized by the press. The report finds that the evidence of a knowing, willful violation of the criminal laws is wanting. Indeed, the report, on page 6, notes that there are “innocent explanations” that Hur “cannot refute.” That is but one of myriad examples we outline in great detail below of the report repeatedly finding a lack of proof. And those findings mean, in DOJ-speak, there is simply no case. Unrefuted innocent explanations is the sine qua non of not just a case that does not meet the standard for criminal prosecution – it means innocence. Or as former Attorney General Bill Barr and his former boss would have put it, a total vindication (but here, for real)...The press incorrectly and repeatedly blast out that the Hur report found Biden willfully retained classified documents, in other words, that Biden committed a felony; with some in the news media further trumpeting that the Special Counsel decided only as a matter of discretion not to recommend charges.
The above is from an article appearing in the Just Security newsletter, which, sadly, will not allow me to link to it here. Howwever, I’ll link to the Google search that gets you to it:
…and if you don’t know who Andrew Weissmann is, here’s his bio. He knows what he’s talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Weissmann
The folks at WaPo are among the few getting it right:
God bless you, WaPo, but it doesn’t matter. Now it’s Hillary’s E-mails 2 – The Re-Sliming and nothing is going to put a stop to the feeding frenzy.
What the fuck goes on at Justice, anyway? And what the fuck is with the New York Times?
Meanwhile, we get shit like this from Donald almost on the half-hour:
As Molly Ivans would have said, this sounded a lot better in the original German. But hey, why pay any attention to any of that when the guy who just had what was probably the most successful and consequential first term since FDR has memory lapses of the sort I have every day, as I try to describe to my wife that story about the guy with the thing who did that thing with what’s-her-name on that show.
I guess I should take a pause now, and go see whether that conservative asshole Ross Douthat has written another op-ed for the Times talking about how Biden has to step aside.
We’re doomed.
the needlefish 