President Joe Biden’s age and mental capacity took center stage Thursday in all the media coverage of special counsel Robert Hur’s report on his investigation of Biden’s handling of classified documents.
But, as the dust settles, it’s important to note that Hur’s choice not to indict was not based on lack of evidence of mishandling.
The Associated Press reported that Hur “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.”
On the first page of the report, Hur wrote, “Our investigation uncovered evidence that President 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. “
But Hur decided that charges were not “warranted.”
Part of Hur’s decision not to indict the president was based, as will certainly go down in history books, on his assessment that the president would appear to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” and that they would likely not convict him of a “serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Is Biden corrupt?
At a news conference Thursday, Biden repeatedly insisted that he “did not share classified information.”
“With your ghostwriter?” one of the media asked.
“With my ghostwriter,” Biden reiterated, adding, “I did not, I guarantee you I did not.”
BIDEN (yelling): “I DID NOT SHARE CLASSIFED INFORMATION!”
The special counsel says he did, in fact, share classified information. pic.twitter.com/kzldAEP2WA
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 9, 2024
But the AP reported that Biden did, in fact, share classified information with his ghostwriter.
According to the AP, Biden shared information contained in some classified documents with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, while the two were working on Joe Biden’s memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.”
Not only that, but the special counsel actually considered charging Zwonitzer, because the ghostwriter destroyed recordings of his interviews with Biden when he found out there was an investigation into the documents.
But, according to Hur, Zwonitzer offered “plausible, innocent reasons” as to why he destroyed the evidence, which made it difficult to refute and likely “insufficient to obtain a conviction.”
Biden has referred to Zwonitzer in the past as a “great, great guy” and said, “I trust him with my life.”
He also has said that Zwonitzer “helped me organize; that was his great asset to me,” according to the AP.
Hur’s report also revealed that Biden retained notebooks from his vice presidency containing classified data and utilized them to assist Zwonitzer in writing his memoir. On multiple occasions, Biden read directly from the notebooks for more than an hour at a time, despite Zwonitzer lacking security clearance, the report stated, according to the AP.
Additionally, one of the recovered boxes of classified materials was labeled “mark Z.”
On Thursday evening, reporters pressed Biden about a reference to classified information mentioned in one of Zwonitzer’s recordings.
Biden shouted, “No, it did not say that.”
“What I didn’t want repeated, I didn’t want him to know — and I didn’t read it to him — was, I had written a long memorandum to President (Barack) Obama, why we should not be in Afghanistan, and it … was multiple pages.”
He continued, “And so, what I was referring to when I said classified, I should have said it should be private, because it was a contact between the president and the vice president as to what was going on. That’s what he was referring to,” the president said.
“It was not classified information in that document. That was not classified,” he added.
Clearly, Biden does not remember what was said in the report.
According to Hur’s report, “evidence supports the inference that when Mr. Biden said in 2017 that he had ‘just found all the classified stuff downstairs’ in Virginia, he was referring to the same marked classified documents about Afghanistan that FBI agents found in 2022 in his Delaware garage.”
🚨 BREAKING: Photos reveal boxes of classified documents Joe Biden stored in his Garage pic.twitter.com/XYp006dI1Y
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 8, 2024
Journalist Sharyl Attkisson tweeted on X, “Note to self: If ever caught doing something illegal, I will appear confused and forgetful, and also well-meaning, and I will have my attorneys swear I meant no harm and pinky promise that they conducted a thorough search and turned over all the evidence against me. That should be good.”
Note to self: If ever caught doing something illegal, I will appear confused and forgetful, and also well-meaning, and I will have my attorneys swear I meant no harm and pinky promise that they conducted a thorough search and turned over all the evidence against me. That should…
— Sharyl Attkisson 🕵️♂️💼🥋 (@SharylAttkisson) February 8, 2024
While there is no doubt that Biden has severe memory and other cognitive and physical problems, the detailed evidence provided in Hur’s report proves that Biden did know he had classified evidence in his possession and used it for his book.
Old age or forgetfulness should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card, and yet Biden has benefited from his poor memory, forgetting details when convenient, which has worked to his advantage.
But the president is not happy when asked if that same “poor memory” makes him fit to sit in the highest office in the land. Then, he insists that “My memory is fine.”
It’s a great attempt to have his cake and eat it, too.
