You have to give it to President Joe Biden: He’ll admit his failings when he literally can’t think of anything else to blame them on.
On Thursday night, the president was allowed to stay up past his bedtime and speak at a news conference following the release of a special counsel investigation into the classified documents he retained at his residence after his time as vice president.
The report was more damning than expected.
Originally, most commentators had believed the president wasn’t going to be prosecuted over the retention of the documents because it was simply a minor oversight, unlike how special counsel Jack Smith is attempting to portray former President Donald Trump’s similar retention of White House documents.
Instead, special counsel Robert Hur essentially said in his report that the man currently running for another four years in the White House had a memory that was so faulty that it would be difficult to prosecute him, if indeed he leaves the White House, due to a jury seeing him “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
We’ll get to that report in a second — but since Biden was allowed to stay up past his bedtime, this also meant you got “Uncle Joe After Dark.” You know, the kind of chief executive who probably should be lying prone on a soft bed like a poached egg on a piece of toast, but instead is babbling whatever’s left of the inside of his cranium out to anyone who asks.
This includes Fox News’ Peter Doocy, who had a point-blank question for the president: “How bad is your memory, and can you continue as president?”
At least Biden was honest in his response, you have to give him that much.
The exchange came after Doocy quoted Hur’s assessment of Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Do you like Peter Doocy?
“I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing,” Biden said. “I’m the president. I put this country back on its feet. I don’t need his recommendations.”
Doocy interjected with the question about how bad the president’s memory was.
“My memory is so bad that I let you speak,” Biden responded.
Fact check: accurate.
Biden is, predictably, underselling the implications of the 388-page report from special counsel Hur, which is startling in its characterization of the president’s inability to remember basic facts — and not just the felicitous, CYA-tastic “I have no recollection of that, counselor” that stoat-like Beltway politicos have been using to get out of giving straight answers under oath since time immemorial.
Instead, Hur’s report paints a frightening picture of Biden that even the most ham-fisted caricature of the man on a sketch comedy show couldn’t conjure.
According to the conservative outlet National Review, Hur’s investigation determined Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”
“These materials included (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods. FBI agents recovered these materials from the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home,” the report said.
However, Hur’s office “conclude[d] that the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” — albeit not for reasons that make life any easier for Joe Biden and his campaign team.
For instance, it said, “Mr. Biden’s memory also appeared to have significant limitations” as early as 2017 in interviews with the man who ghost-wrote Biden’s memoirs, Mark Zwonitzer. (According to The Associated Press, part of the investigation involved whether Biden improperly shared classified information about Afghanistan with the memoirist.)
“Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries,” the report said.
You will not be amazed to discover that things inside Biden’s noggin did not get any better in the intervening time between those recorded interviews and his testimony to the special counsel.
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” the report said. “He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’).
“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
“In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall.”
In other words, the special counsel’s office has concluded that Biden is beyond participating in his own criminal defense were there to be a trial.
But he is not, to himself or to the Democratic Party propping him up like this was “Weekend at Bernie’s” cosplay, beyond the tasks of one of the most important and strenuous jobs in the world, running the biggest superpower in the free world.
The establishment media are willing to play along. HuffPost, for instance, called it a “fiery exchange” and said Biden “took a jab at Fox journalist Peter Doocy during heated remarks Thursday.”
Or, he could just be telling the truth. His memory is bad enough that he forgets that the one voice in the media gaggle that’s always going to ask him an adversarial question in blunt terms is Peter Doocy. He gave Doocy the floor and he did just that. And he admitted, because he had no better excuse available, that his memory is so shot he can’t remember to not call on Fox’s White House correspondent at a press gaggle.
If that and the special counsel’s report don’t tell America everything it needs to know about this man’s competency, nothing will.
