Team Biden’s handling of the Hur report has not gone well. Someone either decided Joe Biden should address the nation in a speech and to answer questions after his bedtime, or failed to convince Biden not to. Experts on both sides of the aisle are panning Biden’s evening speech as not being helpful to his cause, and they’re right.
Now, the Biden campaign is literally trying to fundraise off of “outrage” over the report. The campaign sent out an email Saturday night with a statement from Jill Biden.
Generally speaking, there is nothing new in this statement we haven’t already heard—except for the fact that it includes a detail Joe Biden apparently couldn’t recall: when his son Beau died.
“I hope you can imagine how it felt to read that attack — not just as Joe’s wife, but as Beau’s mother,” the fundraising pitch began. “I don’t know what this Special Counsel was trying to achieve. We should give everyone grace, and I can’t imagine someone would use our son’s death to score political points. If you’ve experienced a loss like that, you don’t measure it in years, you measure it in grief.”
I suspect that whoever wrote this pitch for Jill Biden didn’t know that Jill Biden wasn’t actually Beau Biden’s mother.
For our VIPs: Attacking the Hur Report Won’t Fix the Democrats’ Problem
But I digress—the report wasn’t an attack. Legally, it was a gift, and Biden and his team have been regularly cherry-picking select quotes to support the claim that he did nothing wrong—even though that’s not what the report actually said. Biden and his team are trying to contain the political fallout of the investigation’s assessment of Biden’s cognitive decline. This isn’t attacking Joe, or Beau. As Hans von Spakovsky, a former federal election commissioner and senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained, “An explanation of Hur’s findings on the president’s mental condition was necessary to explain why he is not recommending prosecution.”
The pitch continued:
May 30th is a day forever etched on our hearts. It shattered me, it shattered our family.
So many of you know that feeling after you lose a loved one, where you feel like you can’t get off the floor. What helped me, and what helped Joe, was to find purpose. That’s what keeps Joe going, serving you and the country we love.
Joe is 81, that’s true, but he’s 81 doing more in an hour than most people do in a day. Joe has wisdom, empathy and vision. He has delivered on so many of his promises as President precisely because he’s learned a lot in those 81 years. His age, with his experience and expertise, is an incredible asset and he proves it every day.
What really sticks out about this pitch is that there isn’t a denial of anything in the report. It doesn’t dispute that Joe couldn’t remember when he was vice president or when his son died. In fact, it almost reads like an excuse letter by reiterating the debilitating loss of a loved one, and then by insisting that he does “more an hour than most people do in a day,” as if to suggest that we need to give him some slack because he works so hard. Now, I wouldn’t doubt that Biden takes more vacations in a year than most Americans do in a lifetime, but that’s not the same thing.
We know this because we see it.
We see Biden has the schedule of someone who is taking it easy, and is staying out of sight as much as he can get away with. But, not once in the pitch does Jill even attempt to dispute the report by saying Joe Biden is sharp or has a great memory. If she did, there’d be no reason not to charge him.