The Mind In The Matter

FOTP News in Review for . . . Sunday, February 11th, 2024

Look at the bright side. Robert K. Hur, long-time Republican appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into Biden's alleged mishandling of classified documents when he was vice president, could have channeled James Comey and released his 388-page report the Thursday before the 2024 election.

As it was, Joe Biden has known better Thursdays — not, according to the report, that the president would have even known it was Thursday.

"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 said. "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 . . . . A reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy,” the report stated. “Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.” The report also stated that "Mr. Biden's memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with a ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023."

The president also once fell off his bike. Don’t forget that.

The bottom line, and this shouldn’t be lost in the calls for Biden to step down, is that Kur concluded Biden should not face prosecution, which is pretty important here — in fact, the very reason for the investigation. This is in stark contrast with the ex-president who, according to Kur’s own report, “ . . . not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it.” Trump is also, more importantly, facing 37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office. But Biden is a struggling old man who got the name of the Egyptian president wrong, so, you know, there’s that.

As long as we’re playing Name that Leader, Trump got the name of the current American president wrong on seven different occasions. He did, however, get the name of the Russian president right — and that’s important when you’re calling on a despot to attack our allies. Putin will be less likely to heed the call if Trump keeps calling him “Yeltsin.”

Former President Donald Trump said Saturday he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” if it attacked a NATO country that didn’t pay enough for defense.

Which brings us to CNN’s State of the Union and Jake Tapper’s interview with Rod Rosenstein, former U.S. Deputy Attorney General, appointed by Trump in 2017, who, incidentally, once suggested recording his old boss and getting rid of him through the 25th Amendment. One might expect, then, such a man to be more critical of the naked partisanship of Kur’s report.

One would be wrong.