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Sunday, February 11, 2024

AP - How Biden and his allies are pushing back against a special counsel’s claims about his memory

Let me remember why I wanted to post this. Oh. Right. It matters:

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s Democratic allies are launching an aggressive defense against a special counsel’s explosive claims that the 81-year-old president couldn’t remember major milestones in his life, trying to diminish the significance of the prosecutor’s allegations that Biden was too forgetful to be charged for mishandling classified material.

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.”

Democrats plan to answer the widespread questions about the 81-year-old president’s age and readiness by affirming that Biden is capable of being commander in chief and trying to discredit people who portray him as enfeebled. Key to that strategy is drawing a contrast with former President Donald Trump, the heavy Republican front-runner who is himself 77 and has also confused names and facts while also facing four indictments and multiple multimillion-dollar civil judgments.

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.

Hur

[...] 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."

With that, segue to Digby, (it almost rhymes), 

Another Day Another Hit Job

When will Democrats understand that they get no points for being nonpartisan?

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:

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.

Also, there is much else worth reading:

https://digbysblog.net/author/digshullabaloo/