Biden's most loyal defenders in the media are having a harder time making excuses for him. Not that they didn't try.
CNN tried to make excuses for the Hur report's assessment of his poor memory. In the aftermath of his disastrous speech following the release of the report, CNN's Erin Burnett astonishingly conflated Biden's memory issues to his past struggles with a stutter. "He is someone who often has gone down verbal cul-de-sacs and meandered into another story," Burnett said. "That's part of who he is; that's his brand for the past 50 years."
CNN's John King agreed with her. "The stutter, God bless him," King said. "I mean, the man deserves a lot of credit for fighting through that in a very public way with a camera aimed at him every second of every day, for someone to go through that and put up with it. It takes a lot of courage, and he... just... whether you're Democrat, Republican, independent, you people with hardships have to deal with hardships. He deserves a ton of credit for that."
Perhaps one of the most fair assessments of the scandal came from CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, who was willing to concede that the report was damning for Joe Biden.
“Ultimately, what Robert Hur says in this report is essentially the technical elements of a crime — it appears Robert Hur saying — were met,” Honig admitted. “And he takes into consideration things like […] Joe Biden would have created a sympathetic picture in front of a jury. He had memory issues, he had age issues, and that goes into, did he — was he able to form the mental intent here?”
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But in a piece for New York Magazine, Honig, who is a former federal prosecutor, suggests that the "feeble old man" part of the report is not the real scandal. Honig says that what matters most is that "Joe Biden knew he had highly classified documents in his home, kept them for a reason, and held on to them for years."
"He knew, all along," he continued. "He arguably broke the law, and he definitely misled the American public."
For anyone howling about Hur’s report, let’s recognize, first, that he had to write it. Federal regulations require that, at the end of the investigation, the special counsel must create a report “explaining the prosecution or declination decisions.” Now, one could fairly take issue with how Hur wrote the report. We don’t want prosecutors flaming people they don’t indict, after all, and Hur drafted a 300-plus page tome that included damaging revelations (at times with excessive flourishes) about Biden and others around him. I’ll allow that objection on one condition: You also must be on record condemning another special counsel, Robert Mueller, who wrote a 400-plus page report excoriating Donald Trump without recommending indictment. It’s entirely fair to argue that prosecutors should either charge or stay as mum as possible, or that the special counsel rules are a mess — but it has to work both ways.
He went on to describe the report as "essentially a prosecution memo, a standard document in which prosecutors lay out their evidence and consider the arguments for and against indicting."
The report states on page one that the investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency.” If that sounds familiar, it might be because Trump now faces 32 felony counts in Florida (brought by a higher-profile DOJ special counsel, Jack Smith) for willful retention of national defense information, a federal crime. Hur comprehensively lays out the evidence, and the difficulties a prosecution might face, including the challenge of establishing Biden’s criminal intent. The special counsel’s account of Biden’s mental acuity feels overstated and unnecessarily colorful to me, but it’s a relevant factor that weighs considerably in Hur’s assessment of the case’s shortcomings. Further complicating the picture: Biden had several different batches of classified materials circulating around his Delaware-Virginia-D.C. home-office ecosystem, and he plainly did not know about some of the documents — but, as we’ll discuss in a moment, he absolutely did know about others.
Honig notes that the most significant revelation of the report was Biden's deliberate retention of classified documents. "Biden held on to classified top-secret national-security documents after he left the vice presidency, and he did it intentionally. This was no accident."
Biden had those documents for this specific reason: He believed he had been right on American policy in Afghanistan (and that President Barack Obama had been wrong), and he wanted to paint himself as the visionary hero (and Obama as the heel) in the historical narrative. That’s why Biden shared some of their contents with his ghostwriter — though Hur acknowledges that Biden may have disclosed that classified information inadvertently, citing Biden’s “lapses in attention and vigilance.”
He then explained what the "single most important piece of evidence" in the report was:
In a recording made by the ghostwriter in February 2017 — a month after Biden left the vice-presidency — Biden says he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” That, folks, is the needle-scratch moment. Up until last week, the party line has essentially been, “Hey, classified documents are strewn all around the White House, a bunch of boxes got moved around, transition is chaotic, documents end up in various places; big mistake, whoops, sorry.” Now we know that’s untrue.
Remember, this is a CNN legal analyst's assessment. Do you think he's the only person in the liberal media who knows that Joe Biden is guilty as sin? For sure, he's not, but few are willing to acknowledge it. Instead, they express outrage at how Biden is portrayed as a senile old man and pile on with the attacks on Hur.
But they know the truth even if they won't report it. We're not going to turn a blind eye to Joe Biden's corruption, even if it means our efforts are censored and suppressed. Reporting the facts may put us at risk, but thanks to our VIP members’ support, we’re able to stay online and continue to bring you the unvarnished truth.
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