Everyone is reporting about Special Prosecutor Robert Hur’s investigation of US government documents that Biden had illegally kept. Biden co-operated with the investigation and turned documents over immediately. The radical right is viciously attacking Biden because the report indicated that Biden's memory was seriously bad. The DoJ has decided no to prosecute Biden for “willfully” keeping the documents. Keep the word willfully in mind. The WaPo reports (full article here not behind paywall):
Special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report, while concluding that criminal charges were not merited for Biden’s careless handling of classified documents, painted a devastating portrait of an 81-year-old president whose age has become a central issue in his reelection campaign, saying his memory was “significantly limited” and that he had “limited precision and recall.” One reason prosecutors concluded they would have trouble pursuing a case was that a jury might see Biden as an appealing — if forgetful — senior citizen.
“At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the prosecutors wrote in their report released Thursday. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
A special counsel report released Thursday found evidence that President Joe Biden willfully retained and shared highly classified information when he was a private citizen, including about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, but concluded that criminal charges were not warranted.
Despite abundant differences between the cases, Trump immediately seized on the special counsel report to portray himself as a victim of a “two-tiered system of justice.”
Yet even as Hur found evidence that Biden willfully held onto and shared with a ghostwriter highly classified information, the special counsel devoted much of his report to explaining why he did not believe the evidence met the standard for criminal charges, including a high probability that the Justice Department would not be able to prove Biden’s intent beyond a reasonable doubt, citing among other things an advanced age that they said made him forgetful and the possibility of “innocent explanations” for the records that they could not refute.
In other words, Biden’s bad memory saved him from being prosecuted. Biden apparently committed at least one felony but that could not be proved in court. The level of intent for willfulness would probably not be provable, so the DoJ decided not to prosecute.
The irony of all of this is beyond stupendous. On the one hand, this report could cost Biden the election. He will be ripped to pieces by radical right authoritarian media, politicians and blowhards. But on the other hand, (i) Trump was far worse about his stolen documents crimes, (ii) he claims his memory is just fine, and (iii) once in the White House, he will terminate the stolen documents lawsuit against him. In other words, the felon Biden loses the election and avoids a having a criminal record, but the quadruple felon Trump wins the election and also avoids a having a criminal record.
Time will tell how serious this is for Biden’s candidacy, and for democracy and the rule of law in America. Right now, it looks moderately bad for Joe.
Qs:
1. Is the rule of law an essentially contested concept? (I think it is)
2. Is bad memory Biden better than kleptocrat dictator Trump?
3. Is this a political hack job by Hur to damage Biden as much as possible (shades of Comey dumping on Hillary in 2016)?
No comments:
Post a Comment