If Joe Biden is unfit to stand trial, he’s unfit to be president.
Special counsel Robert Hur’s nearly 400-page report is full of damning evidence of Biden’s carelessness with vital national-security secrets.
And his defense of Biden is that the man is just too old and forgetful to be held responsible for his actions.
Consider Biden’s storage of Afghan war secrets in his Delaware home, including a classified handwritten memo he wrote to President Barack Obama in 2009 that Biden kept because he thought it would vindicate his opposition to sending more troops.
The memo and its classified attachments were found “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.”
Hur suggests that this was so reckless that Biden’s lawyers might convince a jury it had to be accidental: “this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy. Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.”
Well, that’s reassuring.
Maybe Hur should have considered Obama’s infamous assessment: “don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up.”
Hur concluded it was hard to charge Biden with an intentional crime because jurors might believe Biden couldn’t remember where he put things.
In talking to ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in 2017 for a book, Biden shared classified secrets and admitted he had just found classified material in a Virginia house he was renting. Hur found, “Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”
Given that Zwonitzer destroyed other interview tapes, one must wonder if they were even worse.
In Hur’s own 2023 interview, “Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president” and “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” To a jury, Biden might seem “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Who, Hur asked, would convict “by then a former president who will be at least well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness”?
But old Joe is still supposed to be the leader of the free world. He still handles secrets every day, and sometimes he has to make crucial national-security decisions on short notice based on what he’s been told.
He’s also the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer: The president, and the president alone, is tasked by the Constitution to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
That starts with having some memory of what the laws are.
These are demanding tasks. They are not for a man of failing mind who will be 82 by the end of his term and 86 by the end of the next one if he’s re-elected. We might feel bad for Biden, but we’d all be safer if he were eating ice cream on a beach in Delaware enjoying his retirement.
A recent ABC News poll found 86% of Americans think Biden is too old to serve another term. Try getting that many Americans these days to agree on anything.
But as Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said, “You cannot fool all the people all the time.”