President Joe Biden dodged one calamity when it came to his willfully improper handling of classified documents.
But he still ended up getting kneecapped over the episode anyway.
Special counsel Robert Hur found that Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials and kept sensitive documents throughout his tenure as a U.S. senator and vice president.
But Hur in his report declined to recommend criminal charges against Biden because any jury would likely find our president to be merely “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
The report said that in interviews with investigators, Biden did not remember when his term as vice president began and ended, and also did not recall when his beloved son, Beau, died.
Talk about bad timing. The statements, in the midst of a re-election campaign, go right to heart of why voters and some top Democrats worry whether Biden, 81, is mentally fit enough to serve as president.
The report came after Biden was publicly confused over who the current leaders of France and Germany are. Those gaffes were just the latest in the long line of missteps and mistakes that we’ve seen throughout the Biden presidency.
Biden at a press conference on Thursday pushed back at Hur’s report, saying “I know what the hell I’m doing.” Then he proceeded to call the Egyptian president the president of Mexico.
It’s ugly all around. But let’s not forget how damning the report was when it came to Biden’s improper handling of classified documents.
The report found that Biden not only retained classified documents after leaving office, but shared classified information with author Mark Zwonitzer, who was ghostwriting a book for him.
Biden told Zwonitzer of the documents, “I didn’t want to turn them in.”
You mean kind of like former President Donald Trump said when it was discovered that he’d taken classified documents home to Mar-a-Lago?
And like Trump, Biden was found to have stored the documents in a slipshod manner in his private home. Biden later said that he didn’t know how the files got to his home and blamed his staff.
Trump is still facing criminal charges over his handling of the classified documents. But Biden is in the clear.
By the way, Zwonitzer also deleted audio files of Biden after Hur’s investigation began.
Strange that an author would audio files that were used to write a book, especially if the interviewee was the vice president of the United States. That’s history after all. And why did he wait until there was an investigation underway to do it?
Did Zwonitzer run out of storage room on his computer? I’ve still got audio cassettes of interviews I did in the 1980s and 1990s floating around the house somewhere.
No matter. Zwonitzer got a pass from Hur as well.
None of which is surprising. You didn’t really expect the Justice Department to haul Biden into court, did you? That kind of treatment is reserved for Trump.
But the former president did get a boost last week as it appears that the Supreme Court will knock down Colorado’s attempt to keep Trump off the primary ballot there because of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
During oral arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts worried that upholding Colorado’s action would allow GOP states to disqualify Dem candidates and vice versa.
Even liberal Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether one state should decide who can be president of the United States.
Let the voters decide about Trump.
The U.S. Constitution lays out the qualifications for running for president. Trump satisfies them all. States can’t supersede that just because they don’t like Trump.
Jan. 6 was a riot, not an insurrection. So the 14th Amendment’s section on barring insurrectionists from office doesn’t hold water when it comes to Trump.
Not that a positive Supreme Court outcome will solve all of Trump’s legal problems. And Biden’s got problems too. It looks to be one heck of a matchup come November.
Shaky Biden benefits from double standard on improper handling classified documents (opinion)
5
1
11.02.2024
President Joe Biden dodged one calamity when it came to his willfully improper handling of classified documents.
But he still ended up getting kneecapped over the episode anyway.
Special counsel Robert Hur found that Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials and kept sensitive documents throughout his tenure as a U.S. senator and vice president.
But Hur in his report declined to recommend criminal charges against Biden because any jury would likely find our president to be merely “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
The report said that in interviews with investigators, Biden did not remember when his term as vice president began and ended, and also did not recall when his beloved son, Beau, died.
Talk about bad timing. The statements, in the midst of a re-election campaign, go right to heart of why voters and some top Democrats worry whether Biden, 81, is mentally fit enough to serve as president.
The report came after Biden was publicly confused over........
© The Staten Island Advance
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
