Heather Cox Richardson confirmed my reaction to the Hur report. It rambles on repetitively and tediously for 388 pages. But a one-page summary would have told its central funding: classified documents— from the 1970s and from his Vice-Presidency (2009-2017), mostly in his hand-written notebooks—were found in his homes and offices, but there will be no charges against him because there is no evidence of a crime. Biden was completely exonerated. The report’s multiple references to Biden’s age, mental acuity, and memory were gratuitous.
The media takeaway, however, was purely political: Biden’s mental fitness to serve as President became the headline, not the fact that he was completely exonerated.
Should Merrick Garland have expected something different from a prosecutor who is a member of the Federalist Society and who previously was appointed by Jeff Sessions and Trump? Of course, the full report would have leaked, given the political background of its author.
Garland had the duty to review the voluminous and repetitive text before it was released. He could have decided that it should be condensed into a 1-3 page summary, as the investigation of Mike Pence’s documents was. But Garland was afraid it would leak so he didn’t touch it.
Richardson writes:
Yesterday, Special Counsel Robert Hur, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in January 2023 to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents before he was president, released his report. It begins: “We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter. We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.” The Department of Justice closed a similar case against former Vice President Mike Pence on June 1, 2023, days before Pence announced his presidential bid, with a brief, one-page letter.
But in Biden’s case, what followed the announcement that he had not broken a law was more than 300 pages of commentary, including assertions that Biden was old, infirm, and losing his marbles and even that “[h]e did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died” (p. 208).
As television host and former Republican representative from Florida Joe Scarborough put it: “He couldn’t indict Biden legally so he tried to indict Biden politically.”
Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their teams came out swinging against what amounted to a partisan hit job by a Republican special counsel. The president’s lawyers noted that it is not Department of Justice practice and protocol to criticize someone who is not going to be charged, and tore apart Hur’s nine references to Biden’s memory in contrast to his willingness to “accept…other witnesses’ memory loss as completely understandable given the passage of time.”
They pointed out that “there is ample evidence from your interview that the President did well in answering your questions about years-old events over the course of five hours. This is especially true under the circumstances, which you do not mention in your report, that his interview began the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel. In the lead up to the interview, the President was conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.”
Nonetheless, they note, Biden provided “often detailed recollections across a wide range of questions, from staff management of paper flow in the West Wing to the events surrounding the creation of the 2009 memorandum on the Afghanistan surge. He engaged at length on theories you offered about the way materials were packed and moved during the transition out of the vice presidency and between residences. He pointed to flaws in the assumptions behind specific lines of questioning.”
They were not alone in their criticism. Others pointed out that Republicans have made Biden’s age a central point of attack, but Politico reported last October that while former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was publicly mocking Biden’s age and mental fitness, he was “privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations.” Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America and Message Box noted that the report’s “characterizations of Biden don’t match those relayed by everyone who talks to him, including [Republicans].”
He explained: “There are few secrets in [Washington], and if Joe Biden acted like Hur says, we would all know. Biden meets with dozens of people daily—staffers, members of Congress, CEOs, labor officials, foreign leaders, and military and intelligence officials…. If Biden was regularly misremembering obvious pieces of information or making other mistakes that suggested he was not up to the job, it would be in the press. Washington is not capable of keeping something like that secret.”
But the media ran not with the official takeaway of the investigation—that Biden had not committed a crime—or with a reflection on the accuracy or partisan reason for Hur’s commentary, but with Hur’s insinuations. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that the New York Times today ran five front-page stories above the fold about the report and Biden’s memory….
As far back as 1950, when Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) insisted—without evidence—that the Department of State under Democratic president Harry Truman had been infiltrated by Communists, Republicans have used official investigations to smear their opponents. State Department officials condemned McCarthy’s “Sewer Politics” and the New York Timescomplained about his “hit-and-run” attacks, but McCarthy’s outrageous statements and hearings kept his accusations in the news. That media coverage, in turn, convinced many Americans that his charges were true.
Other Republicans finally rejected McCarthy, but in 1996, congressional Republicans frustrated by the election of Democratic president Bill Clinton in 1992 and the Democrats’ subsequent expansion of the vote with the so-called Motor Voter law in 1993 resurrected his tactics. They launched investigations into two elections they insisted the Democrats had stolen. They discovered no fraud, but their investigation convinced a number of Americans that voter fraud was a serious problem.
There were ten investigations into the 2012 attack on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed and several others wounded; Republican-dominated House committees held six of them. Kevin McCarthy bragged to Fox News personality Sean Hannity that the Benghazi special committee was part of a “strategy to fight and win” against then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The strategy of weaponizing investigations went on to be central to the 2016 election, when Trump ran on the investigation of Clinton’s email practices, and to the 2020 election, when Trump tried to weaken Biden’s candidacy by trying to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to say that Ukraine was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden and the company he worked for.
Going into 2024, the House is investigating Hunter Biden, and while witness testimony and evidence has not supported their contention that President Biden is corrupt, the stench of the hearings has convinced a number of MAGA voters of the opposite.
And now the media appears to be falling for this strategy yet again.
Political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen outlined how Biden’s performance disproves the argument that he is unfit for the presidency: “The thing about Biden’s memory,” Cohen wrote, “is that he’s presided over the addition of ~15 million jobs & 800k manufacturing jobs, 23 straight months of sub-4% unemployment, surging consumer sentiment, wages outpacing inflation, the American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPs Act, PACT Act, infrastructure law, gun safety law, VAWA, codified marriage equality, canceled $136 billion in student loan debt for 3.7 million borrowers, bolstered NATO, and presided over electoral wins in ‘20, ‘22 and ‘23….”
It may be, though, that the report has been a game changer in a different way than Hur intended it. Hur’s suggestion that Biden does not remember when his son died seems to echo the moment in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings in which Senator McCarthy was trying to prove that the U.S. Army had been infiltrated by Communists. Sensing himself losing, McCarthy attacked on national television a young aide of Joseph Nye Welch, the lawyer defending the Army.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch demanded. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy didn’t, but Americans did, and they finally threw him off the public stage.
Biden supporters took their gloves off today, producing videos of Trump’s incoherence, gaffes, and wandering off stages, and noting that he mistook writer E. Jean Carroll, whom he sexually assaulted, for his second wife, Marla Maples, when asked to identify Carroll in a photograph. They also produced clips of Fox News Channel personalities Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters messing up names themselves on screen, and gaffes from Republican lawmakers.
Senior communications advisor for the Biden-Harris campaign T.J. Ducklo released a statement lambasting Trump for a speech he gave tonight in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, saying: “Tonight, he lied more than two dozen times, slurred his words, confused basic facts, and placated suingvthe gun lobby weeks after telling parents to ‘get over it’ after their kids were gunned down at school. But you won’t hear about any of it if you watch cable news, read this weekend’s papers, or watch the Sunday shows.”
But it was Biden who responded most powerfully. “There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” he told reporters. “How in the hell dare he raise that…. I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.” And when asked about Hur’s dismissal of him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Biden responded with justified anger: “I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been President. I put this country back on its feet.”
Garland is a lot of things, but he is not a moron. He knew that he had the authority to redact portions of this report, as Barr did for the Mueller Report. That he didn’t shows that he wanted people to see what is says. The report is a hatchet job, and Garland thought that was just peachy. A few months out from the election. Wow.
Assuming you are correct, why would Garland want to sabotage Biden? Does he have another angle? Are the Democrats hoping for a Army-McCarthy moment, as Richardson suggests?
Is Garland simply another servant of the oligarchy? He not only did this but also dragged his feet about charging Trump with anything until he had to because of the crescendo of commentary in the press and in public discourse generally about his inaction. But who knows? Garland certainly has not done Democrats any favors, and he certainly has served Republicans well.
I think that Diane nailed it. Garland is to this election as Comey was to 2016.
We will see if that is true in October.
It may be that this is part of the playbook. Let’s try this now because it worked so well in 2016.
But it’s not going to work this time.
Garland is out of touch with the current political climate. In a sport or in politics, when the other side has no rule book other than to win by any means necessary, you do not put the opposing side in charge of an investigation when so much is at stake. What in the world was he thinking? Team Trump could care less about being fair and balanced.
It doesn’t seem credible to me that Garland would have appointed Hur without having a good idea what Hur would write, and it doesn’t seem credible that he would choose to release an unredacted version of this report given how clearly partisan and ad hominem it is.
I could be wrong about this, I suppose, but on both counts, it smells to high heaven. As does Garland’s dragging his feet for so long about charging Trump.
I don’t often get pi**ed off, but this report written by Special Counsel Robert Hur, and Thursday’s oral argument of how to misinterpret and ignore the very clear section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment did it. Joe Biden is younger than me. Like him I forget names of people or places. My doctor says not to worry about this. Joe Biden must be doing well. Last week he have speeches and greeted people in multiple states. He pulled the country out of the worst pandemic in 100 years. He signed legislation giving families aid for COVID, directed the massive program to inoculate millions of people from covid. He’s seen to it that the CDC and EPA are left to do the work they excel at. My friends who are in their 80s and some in their 90s think, do, write, walk, enjoy, and protest. I’d you want a good example of a memory loss, look no further than the MAGAS and their Dear Leader. He and they forget everyday that they lost the last election. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris didn’t forget. So, there you have it Jack Hassard
Extraordinarily well said, Jack. I agree entirely.
“He and they forget every day that they lost the last election. ”
HAAAAAA!!!! Jack, that is PERFECT. I wish you were a freaking speechwriter for Joe Biden.
Thanks, Bob. I think you’d do a better job
No, Jack. You freaking nailed it. As far as I am concerned, you win the Internet today.
Ok. Thanks.
Jack: lost the election!? Are you crazy? Everybody knows it was those space lasers changing those voting machines in the pedophile pizza parlor. And what about Hunter’s laptop?
It is better to elect a dotard than a fascist, even if that were the choice. I am with Diane. I would vote for an artichoke before I would vote for a fascist.
Redacting the damaging portions would have been a political disaster.
Maybe
I think Garland could have stricken Hur’s personal opinion. Surely his comments about Biden’s mental fitness did not meet DOJ standards.
He could have but I think that would have been a bad decision.
FLERP, Hur’s speculations about Biden’s fitness to serve were wildly inappropriate.
Hur is not a mental health professional or gerontologist. His perceptions are subjective. Like many on the right, he believes his belief is the only truth.
I agree completely but that doesn’t change my view about whether Garland should have redacted the document. My reasoning is elsewhere in the thread.
I am with you, Flerp. It would have been leaked. That would have been much worse. I don’t know how special prosecutors are chosen, but I seriously doubt that Garland is a MAGA plant.
If Garland had cut out the personal observations that slimed Biden, I don’t think they would have been leaked because they reflect poorly on Hur. Such comments don’t meet the standards of DOJ.
As a matter of fact, I have read, DOJ usually doesn’t release a report when they decide not to charge someone with a crime. To do so would put defamatory claims about them into the public realm, and usually they have no way of rebutting them.
Imagine if John Doe was accused of embezzling $1 million on a federal contract. He is investigated and the charge cannot be proved, so it’s dropped. If the details of the investigation were released, his reputation would suffer damage even though he was not charged. That’s why the investigation is not usually revealed unless charges are brought.
Hur said that Biden’s memory was so foggy that a jury wouldn’t convict him. That’s damning.
See my post tomorrow at 9 am.
Richardson is on point as usual. The parallels to McCarthyism are unquestionably accurate. What I do question is her reference to the media getting fooled. They are not fooled. They are complicit. Any fool knows that Hur is a partisan. I can’t fault him for it.
What I can suggest is that making Biden the issue rather than his policies and their success or failure is a conscious decision on the part of editorial leadership. This is failed leadership. Shame on the “liberal” media.
The Democratic Party still doesn’t know how to combat propaganda with propaganda at the level of what the Republican party spews out like toxic, misleading, lying diarrhea.
BLUE must learn how to fight fire with a hotter fire. No more taking the high road. RED goes low like they always have since Reagan and Blue must go lower to beat them at this dirty game.
I agree, Lloyd. The Democrats, especially Biden, are still playing by the rules. The other side is playing Calvinball. They do not care how they behave, nor how they are perceived. Rule sticklers are suckers now.
Mental instability in MAGA world is a thing, as evidenced by death threats to those perceived to be harming Trump.
So, is Hur avoiding death threats by attempting to torpedo Biden?
If what Hur wrote was aimed at protecting his own skin from MAGA world, (and fulfilling his duties as a partisan hack), tragic for democracy.
Yes, Linda. It would be interesting to me if Charles Koch were found to be a major funder of the conferences held by Catholic bishops in the U.S., what you have referred to, I suppose, as “the Catholic Conferences.” I sincerely doubt that that is the case. I suppose that you are referring to the meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, correct?
Sorry, I was responding to a question you asked in a previous post.
Bob,
Thanks for asking. Others may be curious as well. Your question may explain why our thinking diverges on this topic. Almost all of the states have Catholic Conferences which were created as the political arm of the bishops. They are not one and the same with USCCB conferences and are very different from them in every substantive way, except the end political goal.
Catholic Conferences are in daily operation, have full time employees, have paid lobbyists (sometimes the lobbyists are on staff), and, they have sophisticated voter mobilization efforts for individual state ballot issues. Some (many?) are, like Ohio’s, located near the statehouses. My perception is that the voter effort mechanisms follow a centralized template across Conferences.
IMO, they function similar to county headquarters for a political party, with the difference that candidates are winnowed out and issues made dominant. The waters can be muddied when Catholic Conference sites report politicians’ votes on the issues that are of import to Conferences. If I remember correctly, I’ve seen at the sites, on occasion, also, a profile of a state legislator who aligns on a position with them, maybe visited a Catholic event, etc. Although, I’d want to check that to make sure my memory is accurate. The funding for the recent expansion of Conferences at a time when the Church appears to the public to have financial difficulties in various dioceses, is curious to me.
A few years ago, Bishop Hebda prohibited his priests from voting in a Democratic presidential primary. He cited the Catholic Conference in his area as providing the legal opinion that it was a lawful move on his part. The Conferences are also the entity that co-hosted with the AFP, school choice rallies that I have referenced before.
An internet search of a state and “Catholic Conference” will turn up a plethora of sites. The sites when coupled with the search word, “voting,” will likely show what is being done to influence in favor of or against a political issue.
I’m not aware of any journalist who has covered the Catholic Conferences as a totality (confederation?) of political operation so I am unable to provide a reference for that.
The Catholic Conferences are very successful which contrasts with the points made about decline in Church membership.
Again, thanks for asking.
I agree this was a hit job and completely inappropriate.
But I disagree with this to the extent she’s suggesting it’s what Garland should have done: “ Garland had the duty to review the voluminous and repetitive text before it was released. He could have decided that it should be condensed into a 1-3 page summary, as the investigation of Mike Pence’s documents was. But Garland was afraid it would leak so he didn’t touch.”
If this report was condensed or redacted in any way, there would have been a massive outcry about a coverup and a sustained campaign to release the full report would have been mounted. The worst inferences would have been drawn about what information was withheld from the public. The DOJ would have been accused of rank corruption in protecting the President. And in the end, the report would have been released in full, anyway.
Fl: I take your point about the appearance of fairness, but Comey used the same logic for doing the Hillary emails thing in 2016. He did something that was unprecedented that handed the election to Trump. Is Garland going to make the same “mistake?” There is something strange about this.
Garland made his mistake when he appointed Hur.
When the Hur report landed on Garland’s desk, the damage was already done. I can’t imagine trying to withhold it if I were in his position.
Hmmm. Understood. It is not unlikely that someone would have leaked the whole document. It would take a brave soul, indeed, however, to so break the law regarding a DOJ document! Talk about asking to be sent to prison!!!
You think no one on Hur’s office would leak it? Garland wouldn’t take that chance. Why did Mike Pence’s Special Prosecutor issue only a one-page statement: classified documents found, no criminal intent.
Withholding the full report also would have made the timing much worse for Biden. Instead of the report coming out in February, a controversy about what was in the full report would have stretched on for months. Worst case, it would remain a controversy up through the election, or the full report would end up being released closer to the election. Better to get it out as early as possible to avoid a “Comey surprise” next fall.
this fall
Ha, correct.
What Comey did to Hillary violated DOJ protocols. And elected Trump. No gratitude. He fired Comey.
FLERP!,
Correct. You describe exactly what would have happened. Garland tried to mitigate the damage by releasing the Biden RESPONSE to the report at the very same time. I guess Bob didn’t bother to read the response, but it is ironic to hear him criticizing Garland when he is one of the people who for days has been tacitly offering up “facts” he learned from “reading the report” as if those facts were credible and came from a trustworthy document. The media did what Bob did and picked out the most negative, evidence-free innuendo and presented it as if it was fact.
If our democracy and our media were functioning, the release of the report would have been a 1 day story. Folks would have read the report AND the response and instead of jumping to amplify the UNSUPPORTED BY EVIDENCE hit-job innuendo, there would have been a huge backlash. We have a prosecutor who disregarded all ethical and proper behavior and delivered a hit-job on a sitting president. THAT IS NOT NORMAL.
The report itself is enough evidence to show that there is something very rotten in Hur’s office. Using the power of the prosecutor to intentionally smear a sitting president is absolutely unacceptable.
Mueller’s report uncovered real wrongdoing (not accidentally retaining low-classified documents and giving them back when they were found!) And yet it was RESTRAINED. Mueller did not write a long narrative giving his opinion about Trump and his family’s mental states to explain why they didn’t recall RECENT information.
What Hur did was unprecedented. But to do real damage, it needed folks like Bob who would be duped into repeating the worst and most negative innuendoes about Biden, folks who cited the report to reinforce the right wing’s favorite narrative. The narrative that the NYT has already presented as fact in a dozen stories since the report was released: 10citing the report, once again “even Democrats are very concerned about Biden being the nominee, even Democrats are doubtful about the serious effects an aging brain has on Biden, even Democrats raise questions and cite the ‘evidence’ in the Hur report to amplify their concern about how the fact that Biden’s aging brain is so problematic will affect his ability to do his job.”
It didn’t have to be this way. We could have treated it like Marcy Wheeler did. Instead folks like Bob dismiss her with snark.
How anyone on these message boards reacted to the Hur report will have zero impact on anything other than the reactions of the people who read their comments.
That’s true but hopefully we all learn from the posts and one another. I would like to be on the editorial board of The NY Times but I’m not. So each of us does what we can.
True. My point was simply that Bob shouldn’t be harangued for having an honest, immediate response to seeing the report, as if the fate of democracy requires self-editing at every moment so as not to reinforce politically bad narratives.
FLERP!,
Everyone is wrong sometimes. Marcy Wheeler readily admits to being wrong.
Bob read the report and not Biden’s response. Or he made his own judgement to accept the two most damaging narratives – that Biden had done something wrong and it is ONLY because Biden is a cognitively challenged old man that he isn’t being charged for his crime. Marcy Wheeler addressed both of those quite persuasively, but Bob belittles her because he says reading the 380 page report (but perhaps not Biden’s response?) informed him of what he needed to know.
I blame Bob the way I blame NYT reporters. It’s okay to make a mistake, but it’s not okay to ignore what people are saying to you because you are always certain you always know best.
The NYT treats Diane Ravitch the way Bob treats me. Diane tries to give education reporters the information and context they need to present a TRUE narrative instead of a false one, and the NYT just dismiss her as someone with a worthless opinion. The reporters know better. They “read the report” the ed reformers gave them, and they arrogantly believe they have no need to listen to “lesser” minds they don’t particularly like.
I didn’t see Bob get anything wrong. Not writing the exact words you want to see is not the same as being wrong.
The American voters will have long forgotten about the report. The election is 8 months out. Perhaps the MAGA crowd won’t due to the reich wing media keeping it alive, on life support as it is. But the report will not make an iota of difference in the voters’ mind.
You mean the “liberal” media? That is an entity harder to spot than Bigfoot.
Well in TN, you have the TN HOLLER. That’s about it
Duane,
Now we will be subjected to endless videos of Biden and Trump gaffes
Look, the matter of the point is this,
just because we can’t bring the test-
givers to heel, doesn’t mean we
can’t heal the bomb givers.
As it is written:
Forgive them, for they know
not what Bibi does with the bombs…
In reference to what you’d written earlier, Diane, about it45 firing Comey.
Surely Garland would be replaced by the it as well.
Garland is a huge dis-appointment (or mis-appointment, just one of the many horrific letdowns from Obama–Bob called it a form of “appeasement,” & we know how well THAT works out, or would have). He went to a high school that was part of the district I’d attended & was highly touted as brilliant, a genius.
IMO, not only has he not lived up to his potential by not doing his job, he’s turned out NOT to be such a genius. Additionally, I have found him (&, hearing him speak) to be the worst kind of milquetoast.
My opinion of Hur–he’s no Ben, & to him, I say, “Have you no decency, sir?”
Biden can’t fire Garland. It would not be a good look.
Frankly I don’t know what he was thinking.
Republicans did not appoint Democrats as Special Counsel.
Garland is a wimp.
At the least he could have excised the personal comments. They were inappropriate.
As to being a “wimp.” Yes, I’d said that he’s the worst kind of milquetoast!
&–as w/Arne Duncan appointment–clearly NOT thinking (or not thinking clearly). Still scratching our heads over the Nobel Peace Prize…