One of the big takeaways from the newly-released transcript of Joe Biden’s two-day interview with Robert Hur is that the special counsel was being exceedingly generous when describing the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Much of the conversation with Hur is littered with barely coherent answers and spiraling word salads. Though, the reader is occasionally entertained by Biden’s blowhard-y non-sequiturs. We learn about Biden’s Corvette — twice. We learn that the president is a frustrated architect but an excellent archer. Biden jokes that there might be risqué pictures of Dr. First Lady Jill Biden.
Then again, the fact that the entire two-day interview isn’t a giant nonsensical rant is not as impressive as his defenders might believe. The president is, indeed, completely coherent at times. And those are the times he’s probably lying.
When Hur released his report last month, for example, it noted that Biden couldn’t recall the year his son died. This is not the kind of event that typically slips a healthy person’s mind — not even one who is constantly trying to emotionally manipulate the public with misleading claims about the cause of his son’s death.
Recall that Biden feigned great anger about this interaction. “There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” he barked at reporters when the report was released. “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself: It wasn’t any of their damn business.”
The transcript shows that it was Biden who brought up his late son Beau, not Hur. The president claimed he believed Beau had died in 2017 or 2018 when he had tragically died of brain cancer in 2015.
Who knows? Maybe Biden forgot what he said? Reading the full context of his answer, and considering the president’s lifelong fabulism, it is not entirely out of the question that the president purposely floated the wrong date to try and justify his pilfering of classified documents. Either way, it’s bad.
Here is the key interaction:
MR. HUR: So during this time when you were living at Chain Bridge Road and there were documents relating to the Penn Biden Center, or the Biden Institute, or the Cancer Moonshot, or your book, where did you keep papers that related to those things that you were actively working on?
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, um .. . I , I, I, I, I don’ t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?
MR. HUR: Yes, sir.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Remember, in this timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the President. I’m not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point — even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for President. And, and so what was happening, though – what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th –
MS. COTTON: 2015.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Was it 2015 he had died?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: It was May of 2015.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: It was 2015.
By the way, just as Beau did not die in Iraq, Joe was never “at Penn,” not in any real way. The outgoing vice president was bequeathed an honorary professor position at the school, which the Philadelphia Inquirer noted in 2019 was “a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.”
More importantly, Biden also contradicted himself when speaking about the documents themselves.
When Hur asked the president about the classified papers in his possession, the president contended that he “had no purpose for them, and I think it would be inappropriate for me to keep clearly classified documents.” But Hur, in his prepared testimony for Congress, says: “We also identified other recorded conversations during which Mr. Biden read classified information aloud to his ghostwriter.”
So, the documents did have a very specific purpose. Those files were used, according to Amtrak Joe, to help earn $8 million writing a book after leaving the Obama administration.
Yet, when the Hur report was released, the left wing did what they always do when confronted with bad news: they feigned a meltdown. They smeared the messenger. They concoct conspiracy theories. They denied reality. They’re doing the same right now.
The media continues to frame Hur’s findings as an exoneration of Biden to head off the (correct) perception that there is a stark, selective prosecution when it comes to the hoarding of classified documents. Donald Trump, yes. Biden and Hillary Clinton, no.
In The New York Times, Charlie Savage begins the paper’s story on the leaked transcripts by misleading readers with the contention that Hur had found “insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Biden.” This is not true. Hur’s report concluded that Biden came off as too feeble-minded to be convicted by a jury for his decades-long mishandling of classified information. According to the special counsel, the president had “willfully retained classified information.” And he had done it for years before winning the presidency.
During today’s hearing Democrats falsely used the word “exoneration” a number of times. Hur noted that the word “does not appear anywhere in my report, and that is not my conclusion.”
So, the fact remains that there are two ways to look at the Hur report. Either the president lacks the mental acuity to be charged for breaking the law, or he should be charged for breaking the law. Pick one.
