President Biden pulled another “absent-minded” wander-away Thursday, this time on the world stage; count it as one more reason to publicly release the tape of his conversations with special counsel Robert Hur, so voters can get a take on his mental fitness.
The prez abandoned his fellow G7 leaders to chat with a soldier packing a parachute; Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had to gently guide him back.
Back in DC on Wednesday, the House voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to turn over the Hur recordings.
The transcripts (cleaned up to some extent by Merrick’s minions) are already public, but the Biden team has asserted executive privilege to keep the audio under wraps.
Why? This is the interview that convinced Hur that jurors would would see the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
That is, Hur believes Biden broke the law by recklessly mishandling classified documents, but shouldn’t be prosecuted, even when out of office, because the jury wouldn’t convict him.
Since Biden could be out of office next year, that’s a pretty damning judgment of his ability to serve as president another four years.
The Justice Department claims to fear the tapes could be “manipulated” via AI to create deepfakes.
Sorry: Countless hours of Biden recordings are up for grabs; any faker has ample raw material to work with — and Biden deepfakes already exist.
No, the White House plainly fears the tapes will confirm Hur’s assessment of Biden’s cognitive decline, which seems to be getting worse.
Biden’s team has managed him carefully going back to the 2020 race, keeping his public appearances as sparse and as scripted as possible.
But he didn’t have the benefit of a cleanup crew when he sat down with Hur over two days in 2023.
Biden needs no help sounding like a confused, doddering old man, and that’s getting increasingly harder to hide.
Americans should hear the Hur audio anyway: If it’s bad enough, that gives Democrats time to find a different candidate.
Stonewalling to keep Americans in the dark as they decide whether to keep Biden in office for four more years is indefensible.
Release the tapes and let the people make up their own minds.