Last week, we reported that the White House was worried about the forthcoming Special Counsel report on his mishandling of classified documents. Even though they expected he wouldn’t face charges, they were worried the report would “include embarrassing details — possibly with photos — on how Biden stored documents.”
The report did indeed do so, and that was very bad. But it wasn’t the most damaging part of the report. The most damaging part of the report was that the reason why charges weren’t brought is that Biden presents himself as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and it would be difficult to convince a jury he is guilty of a serious felony because to commit such a crime “requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Even the liberal media couldn’t ignore it, and the outlets that normally turn a blind eye to Biden’s problems had no choice but to acknowledge the facts of the report and the political implications of it.
Politico reported that “while the report withheld condemnation of Biden on legal grounds, it presented a harsh portrait of his conduct and mental faculties.”
USA Today concluded that Biden faces a “political nightmare with special counsel investigation.”
“‘Diminished faculties,’ ‘faulty memory,’ ‘significant limitations’: A damning report on Biden’s mental state,” read the headline at CBC News, Canada’s public news service.
“A wince-inducing report has just made it that much harder for U.S. President Joe Biden to quell concerns about his age as he seeks re-election,” the CBC report began. “The special counsel report released Thursday paints the 81-year-old president as suffering from mental decline. And it points to several examples from Biden’s hours-long interviews with investigators.”
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Even CNN called it a “painful report” for Biden.
Hur laid out in detail how Biden mishandled classified materials, writing that FBI agents discovered materials from “the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.”
The materials included classified documents, including some marked at the highest top secret/sensitive compartmented information level, related to military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, as well as and notebooks “containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence source and methods.”
The special counsel raised Biden’s age and memory in explaining why he didn’t bring charges.
The updated report after his speech Thursday even acknowledged how Biden undercut his defense of his memory.
“I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in Gaza, in the Gaza Strip has been over the top,” Biden said. “I think that, as you know, initially, the president of Mexico, al-Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him.”
Here’s what CNN had to say about that.
But just minutes after defending his memory and cognition, the president misspoke and called President of Egypt Abdel Fattah al-Sisi the “president of Mexico,” a moment that undercut his forceful pushback against the report.
CNN conceded that the report was a “political gift” for Republicans. Indeed it was.