The Department of Justice’s Special Counsel Robert Hur revealed several months ago that Joe Biden is an “elderly man with a poor memory” who “did not remember when he was vice president.” Therefore, he would make a poor witness if prosecuted for his willful retention of classified materials throughout his 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president.
Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials,” that he kept in cardboard boxes in his garage in Wilmington, Del., in piles of things that contained “household detritus.” He also stored classified documents in other locations, according to the 388-page report to the Justice Department, finalized late last year.
Among the junk in Biden’s garage were documents that “remains classified up to the Top Secret level and includes Sensitive Compartmented Information, including from compartments used to protect information concerning human intelligence sources,” the report says.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the Hur report said. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
In the U.S. House on Wednesday, Rep. Mary Peltola voted to protect the tapes of the interview that Hur had with Biden, tapes that Attorney General Merrick Garland refuses to provide Congress. Today’s vote, 216-207, held Garland in contempt of Congress, with Peltola sticking with the Democrats to protect the public from learning just how senile Biden really is.
On Meet the Press in late December, Peltola defended Biden as mentally sharp and that “as a native person, I think age is a good thing. Wisdom and experience are a good thing.”
Peltola continued, “I think that Joe Biden’s mental acuity is very, very on. He’s one of the smartest, sharpest people I’ve met in D.C.”
That was not the Special Counsel’s assessment. Hur said Biden did not remember the dates he was vice president when his son Beau died, “even within several years.” Her says Biden “appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.”
Hur said Biden’s legal council would “emphasize these limitations in his recall” if the case went to trial.
On Wednesday evening, Garland issued a rebuke to House Republicans as he continued to refuse turning over the tapes that could show that the president is compromised by dementia: “It is deeply disappointing that this House of Representatives has turned a serious congressional authority into a partisan weapon. Today’s vote disregards the constitutional separation of powers, the Justice Department’s need to protect its investigations, and the substantial amount of information we have provided to the Committees.”
Since Garland oversees the Department of Justice, it is nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which the department would investigate the contempt charge. The president has exerted executive privilege over the recordings.
