After Special Counsel Robert Hur‘s Congressional testimony, one thing is for certain: His portrait of President Joe Biden as an ‘elderly man with a poor memory’ is spot on.
It’s the ‘sympathetic, well-meaning’ part of his report’s conclusion that’s in serious doubt.
Special Counsel Hur, the picture of a non-partisan civil servant, was harangued for five hours on Tuesday.
In a sure sign that he conducted his investigation into the President’s alleged mishandling of classified documents without bias, nearly everyone in the House was out for his scalp.
Republicans questioned Hur’s decision not to indict Biden.
Democrats were hellbent on undermining his judgment that the 81-year-old president is so clearly cognitively impaired that no jury would hold him responsible for breaking the law.
So, one after the other, liberals lined up to allege that Hur is the villain here.
‘You are a member of the [conservative] Federalist Society, are you not?’ spat Representative Hank Johnson, stoking the smear that Hur is a GOP operative who exploited his position to damage Biden in an election year.
No, said Hur, I’m not a member.
Johnson is no Atticus Finch.
Surely, if Hur was trying to undermine the Democrats, he would he have indicted the President.
But undeterred, the Dems pushed on. Above all else, they sought to refute the revelation that Biden couldn’t remember what year his son Beau died.
‘Would you like to correct the record?’ demanded Democrat Madeline Dean, alleging that Biden knew exactly when his son passed away.
‘I don’t believe that’s correct,’ Hur replied.
‘I’ve read about it in reporting,’ Dean shot back.
She was wrong.
The full transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur prove the President not only forgot the timing of his Beau’s death but also a whole host of other key dates.
He thought Beau might have been deployed to Iraq in 2017.
Only off by eight years.
‘When did I announce for President?’ Biden asked at one point.
‘If it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?’ he continued.
‘In 2009, am I still Vice President?’ he queried, seemingly confused.
Then there was this stunning question from a man who has been in government since the Nixon years: ‘Trump gets elected in November of 2017?’
No, Joe, America has never elected a president in an odd-numbered year.
Twice on the same day, he struggled to find the words for ‘fax machine.’ This is the man with the nuclear codes!
Yes, the transcript firmly establishes Biden’s mental struggle. But, just as damaging, it makes clear that he’s also lying through his teeth.
In the President’s now-infamous, late-night February news conference, hastily scheduled after Hur’s explosive report was released, he bristled at the Special Counsel for evoking Beau’s death.
‘There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that,’ shouted Biden, spitting with rage. ‘Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business.’
Not true.
Hur’s transcript lays out in black and white that it was Biden, not Hur, who brought up Beau’s death.
‘In this [2017, 2018] timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying,’ said Biden is recorded saying without provocation.
(For what it’s worth, Beau died in 2015.)
So, Biden was never ‘asked the question [about Beau],’ as he angrily insisted in February.
Cynical Joe evoked the memory of his late son… himself! And then tried to shame Hur with a heart-rending accusation.
Even the First Lady took up this erroneous line of attack.
‘I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points,’ she wrote in a fundraising email to political donors in the days following Hur’s report.
Yes, Jill. That would be abhorrent.
Elsewhere in Hur’s transcript and testimony, there’s more evidence of how disingenuous Biden can be.
At that February news conference, he refused to accept accountability for misplaced documents and blamed his aides instead.
‘I take responsibility for not having seen exactly what my staff was doing,’ he claimed in his trademark politico-doublespeak. ‘Things that were moved were moved not by me but [by] my staff.’
And yet according to Hur, Biden showed a willingness to flash around state secrets.
‘I just found all the classified documents downstairs,’ the President told his ghostwriter, the conversation allegedly captured on an audio recording.
This hired pen, Hur testified, then attempted to destroy the sensitive material. It’s potential proof that Biden was aware that he shouldn’t have it.
Finally, the President’s defenders went to great lengths at Tuesday’s hearing to point out that he subjected himself to Hur’s interrogation on October 8 and October 9 – the days following Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel.
Their inference is that he was distracted by national security matters and pressed for time.
But Hur testified that Biden wasn’t interrupted even once by national security staff. In fact, as Hur’s transcript exposes, it was the President who was wasting time in the middle of an international crisis.
He went off on bizarre tangents about trips to Mongolia, mused about FBI agents finding risqué photos of the First Lady in a bathing suit and rambled about his Corvette making vroom-vroom noises until Hur begged him to stick to the topic at hand.
Biden and Democrats have spun like mad trying to make this all go away – but they’ve only succeeded in damaging their credibility even further.
Tuesday’s hearing and these transcripts may reveal the actions of a confused elderly man, but not a ‘well-meaning’ one.
Through it all, Hur was even-tempered, thorough, and patient as he stood by his report.
Unlike the President, an honest man always knows what he’s talking about.