The absolute best thing you can say for President Joe Biden in the aftermath of the devastating special counsel investigation into his mishandling of classified documents is that at least the president is probably not going to prison.
It’s not that Biden is innocent here. Special counsel Robert Hur found ample evidence that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” but unlike former President Donald Trump, who was indicted on a nearly identical offense, Hur does not recommend that the Justice Department prosecute Biden.
“The best case for charges would rely on Mr. Biden’s possession of the Afghanistan documents in his Virginia home in February 2017, when he was a private citizen and when he told his ghostwriter he had just found classified material,” the special counsel report concedes. However, the report notes a repeated defense that could sow the seed of reasonable doubt: Biden’s sheer forgetfulness.
Referring to Biden’s “limited precision and recall during his interviews,” the special counsel report paints a picture of an old man so senile he ought not manage a local bodega, let alone the White House. And while this may work as a defense of a suspect under criminal investigation — “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,” the report notes.
Biden’s own Justice Department concluding he is an “elderly man with a poor memory” is an absolutely damning indictment of a candidate in the race to run the free world for another four years.
Like Trump, Biden is compellingly found to have retained classified materials, including some of which were related to Afghanistan, in boxes described as “damaged” and “mangled” and “opened” in the garage of his private Delaware home. But when questioned by the special counsel, Biden couldn’t provide cogent answers about their handling, let alone the basic outline of his own biography.
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” the report reads. “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 the Vice President?’).
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“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 with whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama,” it continues.
At best, Biden was intentionally lying under oath and obstructing justice in a cowardly attempt to save his own hide from hard time. At worst, this is the real Joe Biden: a senile old man whose best years are behind him. In the former case, he is morally unfit for the presidency. In the latter, he is functionally incapable of it. And undergirding this entire fiasco is a flagrant and insulting hypocrisy of the fact that while Biden’s Justice Department has taken the unprecedented step of criminally prosecuting his predecessor for willfully retaining classified documents, Biden has gotten away with the exact same thing. And if not for the report detailing his ineptitude for all the world to see, it would be safe to say that Biden got away with it scot-free.
