When does partisan allegiance become elder abuse?
Remember when Robert Hur took pity on President Biden and caught hell for it?
For anyone who’s forgotten, Mr. Hur was the special counsel tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Mr. Biden’s pre-presidential handling of classified documents, some of which had been stored in the garage and basement of the president’s Wilmington, Del., home.
Following an inquiry that included more than five hours of interviews with Mr. Biden over two days, Mr. Hur released a 345-page report of his investigation in February. It concluded that Mr. Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” Nevertheless, Mr. Hur determined that “no criminal charges are warranted.” Why? In part because a jury would be unlikely to convict “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
Democrats and their media pals were relieved that Mr. Biden wouldn’t face charges, but they bristled at Mr. Hur’s descriptions of the president’s declining mental state. “In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse” than in his recorded conversations with his ghostwriter in 2017, Mr. Hur reported. “He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013—when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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