Who Is Robert Hur?

I chose Robert Hur for my VIP for this week because he is one of the few people who are willing to be truthful about the cognitive ability of President Joe Biden. At least half of the voters in the 2020 presidential election could see that Joe was already senile at that time. As time goes along, more people have expressed dismay at the mental health of the POTUS.

Aamer Madhani, Steve Peoples, and Colleen Long published a story at AP News about Hur’s special counsel report. The authors jumped on Hur’s statement that “no criminal charges against Biden are warranted” and pointed out that this is a “key difference from Donald Trump’s situation.” However, the authors said that “there was evidence that Biden ‘willfully’ retained and disclosed highly classified materials when he was a private citizen. And it highlights his confusion and ‘significantly limited’ recall of events related to the documents.’”  They did not mention Hur’s description of Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory.” The authors gave the following takeaways from Hur’s 345-page report. 

It's Bad News For Biden’s Anti-Chaos Argument

Biden can breathe easier knowing he won’t face criminal charges for his handling of the documents. But the Hur report nonetheless does damage to Biden’s case that he brings normalcy to the presidency after the chaos of Ttump’s tenure….

Trump is under criminal indictment for knowingly hanging on to classified records t his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and resisting turning them over…. Biden, for his part, faces no charges.

Weeks after the FBI searched Trump’s private residence and turned up classified documents, Biden slammed his predecessor as “totally irresponsible.”

As Biden ramps up his 2024 reelection campaign – and his case against Trump – he’s not likely to try that argument again.

Biden’s Hazy Memory Raises New Questions About Age

The 81-year-old Biden was already dogged by questions about whether he’s too old to serve a second term. The special counsel report will hardly be helpful to Biden on that count.

Hur noted that “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited” in interview with the special counsel office as well as with a ghostwriter that Biden worked with….

Polls have shown that many Americans, including Democrats, have concerns about Biden’s age. He would be 86 at the end of his second term if reelected.

Trump Gets Ammo To Play Down His Own Documents Case

Biden was absolved of criminal behavior, but it’s Trump who may benefit.

The Republican former president, who is on a glidepath to his party’s nomination this year, has been charged with dozens of felony counts related to his handling of classified materials stored at his Florida estate after leaving the White House. Trump has been crying foul on the campaign trail for much of the last year, noting that Biden had also stored classified material in his garage.

Thursday’s report will have little bearing on Trump’s legal case, but it makes his political argument stronger….

Report Stirs Memories of 2016 Probe of Hillary Clinton

The parallels are striking.

An embattled candidate Trump was struggling under the weight of mounting political crises on the eve of the general election that year when federal investigators made an unusual announcement about his Democratic opponent’s handling of classified documents: Hillary Clinton’s emails.

In late October of 2016, FBI Director James Comey announced that Clinton would not face criminal charges in an investigation into her handling of State Department emails on her private server after having castigated her months earlier for being “extremely careless.” It was a legal victory for her. But the politics were bad for Democrats….

Biden Thought Personal Notebooks Were His Property

During his interview with special counsel investigators, Biden was emphatic that his notebooks were “my property.”

“Every president before me has done the exact same thing,” he said.

The statement had echoes of former President Donald Trump, who has been charged with illegally possessing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office.

“Under the Presidential Records Act, which is civil, not criminal, I had every right to have these documents,” Trump has said.

Sounds similar, but there are some differences. Trump was arguing that large swaths of presidential records were his personal property. Biden was making a specific claim about personal writings, for which there is legal precedent….

Investigators said that Biden mentioned that former President Ronald Reagan kept diaries in his home and that contemporaneous evidence form the investigators suggested that Biden believed he could keep the notebooks at home.

That’s true. Reagan left the White House in 1989 with eight years’ worth of handwritten diaries though they contained top secret information, investigators said. Those documents came up during criminal litigation in the late 1980s and were referred to by the justice department as “personal records.” ….

Report Takes Shots at Biden’s Memory, Mental Capacity

The special counsel’s report takes what seems at times gratuitous aim at Biden’s memory and mental capability as it lays out the ways in which the president could mount a hypothetical defense had he been charged with a crime.

It reports: “We have also considered that, 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.”

Why so harsh? The Justice Department is in a precarious position, investigating Biden, his son Hunter and also Donald Trump on separate accusations, all during the 2024 presidential campaign….

The dings at Biden’s memory were blasted as cheap, false shots by Biden’s attorney and White House lawyers, who said the report uses prejudicial words to describe “a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events.”