In the wake of the politically devastating special Counsel report on Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, there has been a coordinated effort from the left to attack Special Counsel Robert Hur for including assessments of Biden’s poor memory within the report.
“When the inevitable conclusion is that the facts and the evidence don’t support any charges, you’re left to wonder why this report spends time making gratuitous and inappropriate criticisms of the president,” White House Counsel's Office spokesman Ian Sams claimed.
"Special Counsel Hur report on Biden classified documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions,” Barack Obama’s wingman, former attorney general Eric Holder, said on X/Twitter.
Some in the media were also jumping to Biden’s defense.
“It was outrageous that Hur put in some of that stuff in this report,” claimed Jeffrey Toobin on CNN Thursday. "That had no place in it. There is no reason why this report had to be 300 pages. There is no reason why this fairly straightforward case had to be treated this way. And the—I mean, this was just like what James Comey did to Hillary Clinton when he supposedly cleared her of the use of classified information, and then talked about how reckless and terrible she was."
Related: Special Counsel Finds Biden Is Too Damn Old to Be Charged in Classified Docs Scandal
Toobin added, “You know, the job of prosecutors is to put up or shut up. If you have a case, bring your case. If you don't have a case, shut the hell up or say as little as—"
"Do you think he's playing politics?” asked Anderson Cooper.
"I absolutely do,” Toobin said.
Holder and Toobin are hardly alone, but that doesn’t make them right. In fact, legal experts say it was actually necessary and appropriate to describe Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory" and point out that he couldn’t remember the years he was vice president or when his son Beau died.
“The inclusion of the passages about President Biden’s memory was entirely appropriate. [Hur] was required to evaluate how the evidence would be considered before the jury and to make a confidential report to [Attorney] General Garland,” Mike Howell, director of the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project and a former senior counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight, told the Daily Caller.
He also noted that it was Attorney General Merrick Garland who chose to release the report as it was written. “The White House knows this, but their press staff, particularly Ian Sams, are congenital liars,” Howell said.
Related: How Is Anybody Still Defending Joe Biden?
Hans von Spakovsky, a former federal election commissioner and senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, says he doesn’t know of any regulation Hur may have violated. “An explanation of Hur’s findings on the president’s mental condition was necessary to explain why he is not recommending prosecution.”
Indeed, the report makes it quite clear that Biden’s poor memory is the main reason for the decision not to charge him.
Democrats can’t attack the messenger here and think that it will be an adequate defense of Biden. The report has reinforced what the public has already seen and believes about Joe Biden. The polls have made it clear that everything Hur and his team saw is exactly what the public has seen almost daily for three years now.
