Guilty But Clueless: Special Counsel Verdict On Biden

by James Bovard, February 12 2024

Did a Special Counsel report officially launch the Biden administration Death Spiral?

President Joe Biden is not guilty because he is hopelessly clueless about his own life and career. That is the tacit verdict of Special Counsel Robert Hur, who concluded that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed” classified information, which “risked serious damage to America’s national security.” If anyone else did this, they would be federal crimes.

But Biden cannot be convicted of a “felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” the Special Counsel concluded – apparently because Biden’s mind is gone. Uncle Joe is little more than “an elderly man with a poor memory,” according to the report.

The Special Counsel report stated that “Biden’s memory was significantly limited… in his interview with our office in 2023.”  Was “significantly limited” a euphemism for “undetectable?”

Biden “did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended.” Pathetically, Biden asked the interviewers: “When did I stop being Vice President?”

Biden “can’t remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died” – even though Biden never misses a chance to seek sympathy from audiences by mentioning that death.

Biden exempted himself from federal law long ago. Biden presumed that former Vice Presidents had a divine right to disclose federal secrets to their ghostwriters. Biden told his ghostwriter in 2017 that information was classified but later claimed to the Special Counsel that he didn’t really mean “classified.” The Special Counsel found that assertion “not justified’ based on Biden’s “nearly fifty years of experience dealing with classified information.”

The report denigrated Biden’s recall in the 2017 recorded interviews with the ghostwriter as “often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.” But his memory was even “worse” in 2023, the Special Counsel lamented.

Unfortunately, American politics has become almost as infantilized as Biden’s recall. Team Biden’s biggest fear was that the Hur report would include jolting photos of classified documents recklessly strewn around Biden’s home and garage. Bingo!

But who amongst us have not stored notebooks full of top secret information underneath their TV, as Biden did in Delaware?  The report noted that classified Afghanistan documents were found “in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.”

The Special Counsel report concluded that if Biden was prosecuted for violating the law, “his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall.”

But how can Biden be fit for the presidency if he is unfit to prosecute? If Biden is re-elected, should the official Oath of Office be modified to promise to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States… on days that I remember that I am President?”

Biden’s legal team denounced the Hur report for “investigative excess” that resulted in “trashing”  Biden “with extraneous, unfounded and irrelevant critical commentary.” But the Special Counsel did not take an oath to hide Biden’s debility from the American people.

The 388-page report provides perhaps more insights into the commander-in-chief than perhaps Hur intended. Congressional Republicans should demand to see the full transcript (or video) of the Special Counsel’s five-hour interview with Biden. There were likely other Biden blackouts as bad or worse as those revealed in the Special Counsel report.

The White House compounded the damage from the report with a hastily-called press conference that was dominated by President Biden screaming at reporters. “My memory is fine!” he asserted. When a female reporter asked about voters’ concern about his age, Biden finger-pointed and growled: “That is your judgment! That is your judgment! That is not the judgment of the press!”

Biden took no personal responsibility for the violations of federal law recounted in the report. The president angrily derided what he called “the extraneous material” in the report.  Biden again played the Beau card to exonerate himself – or at least get sympathy. The report stated that Biden “can’t remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” Biden raged: “How in the hell dare he raise that question… I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.” Biden declared that “I wear since the day he died the rosary he got Our Lady of …” and then his voice faded off, perhaps because he forgot the name of the church.  Biden proclaimed, “ I am the most qualified person in this country be to be President of the United States.”  Biden also bizarrely claimed that he had vowed to be a president for everybody “whether they were from a red state or a green state.” Is “green state” defined by more than 20% of residents owning a Tesla, or what?

He also declared, “The bottom line is the matter is now closed.” But the president doesn’t reap bonus points for an active fantasy life.

But there was no applause from a White House press corps, some of whose members had wondered if Biden would announce his resignation that night. Even Biden’s allies were bailing ship, per the NBC News headline: “’A nightmare’: Special counsel’s assessment of Biden’s mental fitness triggers Democratic panic.”

This report should not expunge the brazen political racketeering by Team Biden on the classified documents. After sending a massive FBI squad to raid Trump’s Florida home, the Biden White House delayed admitting that the president may have violated the same law until after the congressional mid-term elections. Biden and his advisors “gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake,” the New York Times reported early last year. Biden initially sought to dismiss the controversy over his classified documents as an uproar over “stray papers” that he kept “in a locked garage.” He later shrugged off photos of a box of documents next to his old car: “By the way, my Corvette is in a locked garage, so it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street.”

Ironically, one year ago, White House officials told the New York Times that Biden’s defense on the classified documents controversy will rely on his “decades-long reputation for integrity and honesty.” Apparently, Team Biden did not have a Plan B.

The Special Counsel report exonerating Biden’s abuses will make it more difficult to convict former President Donald Trump for the same offenses. Predictably, Trump issued a statement denouncing “A TWO-TIERED SYSTEM OF JUSTICE AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL SELECTIVE PROSECUTION!”

The media is ignoring the criminality of the Washington status quo – creating trillions of pages of new secrets each year. But blindfolding American citizens is a victimless crime inside the Beltway. Other poohbahs have been caught violating federal secrecy laws but skated without a day in jail. As Hunter Thompson quipped, “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”

In a speech to the House Democratic Caucus Thursday afternoon, Biden claimed victory because the Special Counsel “reach[ed] the conclusion… that there are no charges that should be brought in this case.” Does Biden not even realize he has just been certified as mentally incompetent for office? Nixon was famous for asserting, “I am not a crook.” Will Biden achieve equal notoriety for proclaiming, “I am not mentally incompetent?”

Or perhaps this proclamation from Thursday night will be his epitaph: “I know what the hell I’m doing.”

Prior to the report’s release, I jotted a note in my working file for this article: “BIG QUESTION – will Democrats exploit the report to push Biden off the plank?” The answer remains to be seen. Maybe holding another press conference will solve all of the president’s problems? Having to angrily defend your mental competence is a difficult starting place for redemption.