Biden’s Hur Report Problems Aren’t Going Away. They May Be Getting Worse.
It's been just over a week since the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur's damning report on Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents. Though the report technically absolved him legally, it was politically devastating for Biden because it exacerbated one of the key issues hurting his hopes of reelection: concerns about his advanced age and cognitive health.
The report assessed that Biden's memory was "significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017 and in his interview with our office in 2023" and determined it wasn't worth bringing him to trial because 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." Thus it would be "difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him [...] of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
An indictment may have been politically preferable.
Biden has since sought to dispute the Hur report's assessment and attack Hur himself. In the days since the report's release, several administration officials have been loyally pushing White House-approved talking points to the media about Biden's physical and mental acuity — which they claim to have personally observed but otherwise have no proof of. Democrats have also come out of the woodwork to moan and groan about how gratuitous the report's assessments of Biden's mental faculties were.
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Be that as it may, the Hur report made Biden's cognitive decline a top story that even his loyal defenders in the media couldn't ignore, and Biden's impromptu press conference ensured that the story wouldn't be buried anytime soon. Sometimes the best thing to do is just wait out the storm and hope something else captures the public's attention.
This story just got legs for at least another month. On March 12, Special Counsel Robert Hur is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee regarding his investigation into Biden's mishandling of classified documents. You can expect that Biden's five-hour-long interview with Hur will be a major topic of conversation.
This will give Republicans ample opportunity to put Biden's physical and mental shortcomings under the microscope. Sure, Democrats will do their usual smear campaign against Hur, who can simply say, "Would you rather I recommended charges?" among other things.
We can already guess that Hur's testimony won't go well for Biden or the Democrats. Biden's claim last week that he was angry at being asked about his son Beau Biden's death — the year of which Joe Biden was unable to remember — has since been proven to be a lie by people involved in the interview, who said that Biden brought up Beau.
Special counsels often testify on Capitol Hill after releasing their reports, but Biden's public hissy fit about the contents of the report made it inevitable. Worse yet, Biden and his team should have known better than to promote a false narrative about what happened in the interview, which adds something else to make the president look bad. Not only is he senile, but he's a bad liar, too. Hur's testimony next month should give extended life to this story, and that's no good for Biden.
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