When special counsel Robert Hur announced his decision last month not to prosecute Joe Biden for his possession of classified documents, he made a startling claim: The president suffered from significant memory loss, Hur wrote, botching dates, names, and details—including the year of his son Beau’s death. This narrative had a chokehold on Biden’s reelection campaign until Tuesday, when newly released transcripts of the two-day interview revealed that Hur exaggerated and misrepresented multiple statements in an obvious effort to depict the president as a senile geezer unfit for office. Democrats hammered this point during a congressional hearing shortly after the transcripts came out, venting their fury at Hur for manipulating the record to smear Biden’s mental capacities. But in a sense, their rage was misplaced. It would be more appropriately directed toward the one person on the planet who apparently believed that Hur would serve as a fair arbiter of this controversy: Attorney General Merrick Garland.

It was Garland, after all, who appointed Hur—a former U.S. attorney appointed by former President Donald Trump—to investigate the allegation that Biden held on to classified materials after leaving the vice presidency. No one forced Garland to do so. There were plenty of former U.S. attorneys under Democratic presidents who served with integrity and could have stepped into the Biden probe. But as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has noted, there appears to be an unwritten rule that only Republicans may be appointed as special counsel when a president or presidential candidate is accused of misconduct. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Trump, and now Biden all faced down GOP prosecutors. Garland made the conscious decision to continue that tradition, with results that are as disastrous as they are predictable: His choice to scrutinize Biden transformed the job into an audition for an even more prominent role in Trump’s second administration.

And again: Can anybody really blame him? Yes, Hur’s dishonest jabs at Biden showed a profound lack of probity and principle. Yes, Hur took advantage of the investigation’s secrecy (and the president’s respect for its confidentiality) to paint a picture of his findings that, in many key........

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