Biden set the angry tone hours after special counsel Robert Hur’s
report was released, dismissing the report’s conclusions about his
memory and insisting he hadn’t forgotten the year his son Beau died, as
Hur claimed. Democrats on Capitol Hill and around the country quickly
followed.
“Republicans saying that Biden is old is the least
surprising thing in American politics,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii,
said. “It’s all they’ve got.”
There is an engaging simplicity to, "It's all they've got."
He's running the country while a lawyer named Hur insinuates he's unfit to run the country. Jim Jordan would say so also. That, and cash, will buy a latte at Starbucks.
I believe Trump is saying Nikki Haley is unfit to run the country, and he used to say that about DeSantis.
Grow up folks. It will be Biden as the Dem candidate, Trump as the GOP candidate, and irrelevant independent people, one a Kennedy.
Hur is not running for any office. His mandate with its Special Counsel paycheck has expired. Where he goes next to keep food on his table might be an interesting thing to try to follow. If MSM cares to do any follow-up.
Actually, his career has highlights. AG Garland tapped him out of privater practice, GibsonDunn, Jan. 12, 2023, as Biden documents special counsel, and he wrote a lot in a short time. He will do okay after that writing effort. He has the credentials.
[...] was a law clerk from 2002 to 2003 to then-Chief Justice
William Rehnquist, a staunch conservative who was nominated to the court
by President Richard Nixon and nominated for promotion to chief justice
by Reagan.
According
to federal campaign filings, Hur has donated to at least three
Republican political campaigns. He donated $500 to former U.S. Attorney
Christina Nolan, a Republican, in January 2022, when she was in the GOP
Senate primary in Vermont, which she went on to lose. According to OpenSecrets,
Hur also donated $200 to Maryland GOP Gov. Larry Hogan in 2017 and $201
to GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona during his presidential campaign in
2008.
Hur was also involved with Trump’s law enforcement
agenda to crack violent gangs like the group MS-13. He appeared in the
White House briefing room in 2017 alongside then-press secretary Sarah
Huckabee Sanders to preview a trip Trump was set to make to Long Island
to discuss the goal of eradicating MS-13.
[...] As Hur was set to leave the federal government in 2021, Maryland's
Democratic senators, Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, praised him for
his "excellent service" as the U.S. attorney for the state. They said
Hur "upheld the finest traditions of the office and the U.S. Department
of Justice (DOJ), and faithfully followed the facts and the law."
Whatever his history, he was of no help to Joe Biden while deciding that declining any prosecution of Biden re classified documents was proper --- via a classic it's not what you say but how you say it effort. Leaving Dems in mop-up mode.
___________UPDATE__________
As part of the dilemma, but without suggesting much time be spent on scan reading, an NYT item carried by SeattleTimes; beginning:
Former President Donald Trump has praised Hungary’s prime minister,
Viktor Orban, for his leadership of Turkey, and confused Nikki Haley and
Nancy Pelosi. President Joe Biden has named dead former European
leaders when describing his contemporary peers, and referred to Egypt as
Mexico.
The episodes might have raised parallel concerns about
age and mental acuity. Instead, while Biden, 81, has been increasingly
dogged by doubts and concerns about his advancing years from voters,
Trump, 77, has not felt the same political blowback.
The response
suggests profound differences not only between the two men, but in how
they are perceived by the American public, and in what their supporters
expect of them — a divide that could play a major role in the coming
presidential election.
The item gets into quoting "experts" on presentation and demeanor; and it all hangs together very much less that ageism used against Biden where by din of repetition the Republican machine wants to make "truth" from unending "assertion, reassertion." Or as the Hawaiian gentlemen put it into a nutshell, "It's all they've got."
Stop there. No reader should miss that twenty minute video showing who we REALLY are dealing with, GOP dirt-bagging aside; hence it's embedded here.
Each of us should hope to show such acuity in a one-on-one conversation with an equally intelligent conversant. Biden's not lost it, not at all!
Do not read past that video without viewing it. An imperative sentence, not a polite request, a demand.
Digby continuing:
Perhaps someday Democrats will learn their lesson but I’m
not holding out much hope at this point. I’m referring, of course, to
their inexplicable habit of allowing only Republicans to hold the job of
Special Prosecutor. This has been going on for decades now and the
results have been predictable.
The idea is to prove how noble and non-partisan they are in
comparison to the hacks on the GOP side and it just ends up coming back
to bite them. The habit goes back to Watergate after President Richard
Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a Democrat, in the
Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon had Cox replaced with one of his
supporters, Texas Judge Leon Jaworski, whom everyone assumed would be
sympathetic to the president. As it turned out he was appalled by what
he saw and issued subpoenas for the tapes which wound up in the Supreme
Court as US v Nixon. However, it was later revealed that
Jaworski didn’t agree with the Grand Jury’s recommendation to
criminally indict the president and resigned from the job just as the
cover-up trials began. As we know, it all became moot when President
Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon.
When the Reagan White House came under investigation for the Iran-Contra Affair
a Republican judge named Lawrence Walsh was appointed by a three judge
panel under the new Independent Counsel statute. He was a pretty zealous
prosecutor and uncovered quite a bit of dirt but in the end was
thwarted by President George H. W. Bush and his Attorney General William
Barr who pardoned all the possible defendants just before Bush left
office in 1992. Funny how that worked out for Republicans again.
During the Clinton years, Attorney General Janet Reno named Republican Robert Fiske
as special prosecutor to investigate the Whitewater scandal and he was
later replaced in the job by ultra conservative Republican judge Kenneth
Starr after Clinton himself signed the re-authorization of the
Independent Counsel Act giving a three judge panel of right wing
partisans the ability to assign one of their cronies.
I’ll never forget when Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans put the Starr Report,
sight unseen, on the internet only to find out that it was a downright
pornographic romance novel (partly written by the man who became Supreme
Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh) which had as much resemblance to a legal
document as a grocery store receipt. It ushered in a new era in right
wing hit jobs that ended up backfiring on the Republicans but not before
causing massive damage to the lives and reputations of dozens of
people.
Fast forward to 2016 and the Russia Investigation, headed by
yet another Republican, former FBI Director Robert Mueller. The GOP
Department of Justice knew it wouldn’t be right to have a Democrat
investigate a Republican president. Why they might be partisan!
Special Counsel is a Republican job, no matter what. Until
the appointment of Jack Smith who has been assiduously apolitical during
his career, there has never been anything but Republicans in the job
since Archibald Cox and it’s a problem.
I bring this up because yesterday the special prosecutor
assigned to investigate whether President Joe Biden committed any crimes
by retaining some classified documents from his time as a senator and
Vice President announced
that he was declining to prosecute for lack of evidence that Biden had
willfully taken them or obstructed the investigation as Donald Trump had
done. Like VP Mike Pence, it appears that he unknowingly took some
classified documents when he left office which is apparently not all
that uncommon. What is uncommon is for someone to try to hide them from
the authorities and refuse to give them back as Trump has been indicted
for doing.
But Special Prosecutor Robert Hur is a Republican,
Trump-appointed Justice Department holdover who, once again, was
appointed by a Democratic Attorney General in order to prove just how
“non-partisan” the department is. So Hur wrote a voluminous 388 page
report which most legal observers believe could have been done in 50, if
not less. He could have simply said he declined to prosecute and left
it at that but what he did was nothing less than a partisan hit job
masquerading as a prosecutorial declination.
Despite laying out in detail that he could find no evidence
that Biden committed any crime, making it clear that what he did do was
far less egregious than what Trump is accused of doing and declaring
that he would not prosecute Biden even if he were out of office, Hur
wrote what amounts to a chatty little novel about what he thinks of
Biden’s personality and mental capabilities. [...
He opens the report with what amounts to a character study
of Biden that suggests he has delusions of grandeur because he saved
papers early in his career because he thought he might be president
someday. Then he embeds in the the report a fatuous rationalization
that he personally believes that if he were to bring the case to a jury —
a case which he has already stated he could not find the evidence to
prove — they would feel sorry for Biden because he is a “well-meaning,
elderly gentleman with a bad memory.” He dug deep to find a way to get
that in there. He pretty much implies that the president is demented
because he didn’t perfectly remember dates from the past, something
which defense lawyers commonly tell their clients to be careful about
trying to do under oath.
It’s a nasty piece of slander that Hur no doubt believed
served the purpose of preserving his place in MAGAworld without him
having to recommend charges based on nothing. As one of president
Obama’s top advisers put it:
Let's
be clear–the special counsel isn't a dummy and we should be very
careful not to take the bait after Comey pulled this in 2016. Hur, a
lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn't have a case against
Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically.
This reaction from Tennessee GOP Senator Marsha Blackburn is typical:
That woman, by that web posting, proves herself clearly too ignorant to be a janitor in the Senate, yet, Tennessee - she is a Senator there.
Digby's wrapup -
It’s hard to imagine House Republicans would use this
heavily padded tome as the basis for an impeachment article since it
would also put Trump’s stolen documents case back on the front burner
again but they might just do it. Lord knows the rest of their case is
going nowhere. If I were a conspiracy minded person I might even think
that Hur took a page out of Ken Starr’s bodice-ripper and wrote it just
for that purpose. If so, they might want to check in with Newt Gingrich
about how well that worked out for them.
This was a shamefully inappropriate cheap shot against
President Biden but in the end, despite the media’s febrile “but her
emails” reaction, I doubt that this changes much in the dynamic as long
as the Republicans are all genuflecting to the man whose memory is so
bad that he mistakenly identified his rape victim as his former wife during a deposition. They have much bigger problems on their hands,
Well. Do not only watch that interview video, tell others about it. Newspapers are contracting, corporate ownership by a few firms expanding, and "journalists" who depend on the paycheck, first and foremost, meet the deadline. It can be however long as space allows, editors are not what they used to be, and the easy way clearly is better than the hard way, that being real journalism *and* meeting the deadline.
What could be easier than to read Hur's executive summary, not even scanning any of the report, and then paraphrase. Calling that reporting the report, off to the bar for cocktails. Yo, folks - the man said Biden is too confused to prosecute because a jury would say, "What a nice elderly man" and excuse him of crime - coincidentally, crime of which I, Special Prosecutor reporter, have no evidence of. Yeah, I admit that, but only after trashing the man's memory and Gestalt in a way appropriate for the take-it-easy journalists to meet their deadlines.
Digby does have a fine point about why in the world Dems appoint Republicans as Special Prosecutors.
