How will Hur’s excuse play in Peoria?

It turns out that Joe Biden had a lot of boxes full of papers from his days as vice president and senator. It’s true that you can collect a lot of papers over a 50-year career.  We understand that.  However, Biden had a lot of papers that he was not supposed to have.  We learned that in Robert Hur’s report.  In fact, Biden has a lot of explaining to do, as Julie Kelly wrote:

Even the nation’s most guarded secrets were unsafe in Biden’s hands. “[In] August 2010… Mr. Biden failed to return Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information (also referred to as ‘codeword’) contents of a classified briefing book that he had received during a trip to the Hamptons.” His reckless management of classified papers so alarmed White House officials that they scheduled a briefing with Biden that same month to review the necessary protocol.

Despite the briefing, Biden’s carelessness continued throughout his term. He would “frequently… leave classified documents unattended, outside of safes, at the Naval Observatory and his Delaware home,” former aides told investigators.

New details from Hur’s investigation, which involved interviews with 147 witnesses and Biden himself, indicate Biden’s bad habits didn’t stop after his vice presidency ended. 

Hur:

“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. These materials included (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”

Hur then explained why he would not indict Biden apart from settled law that prohibits the prosecution of a sitting president: Biden, Hur concluded, lacks the mental acuity to face trial. Among other lapses, Biden “did not remember when he was vice president” and “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”

Biden is lucky to be protected from prosecution by the presidency and an apparent case of dementia. 

Who knew that dementia would save Joe from indictment?  Maybe Trump should get a note from his doctor saying that he has dementia.  He should present it to AG Merrick Garland and halt his document investigation.

In the end, the question is, how does this play in Peoria?  My guess is that it won’t play well because Joe’s document problem is just the latest in a double standard of justice.  We’ve gone from “Clinton’s ‘really sloppy’ handling of classified info” to Biden is an  “‘elderly man with a poor memory” to “Trump has to go to jail for mishandling documents.”

So here we are and Peoria is not buying the story.

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Image: U.S. Attorrney’s Office