Special Edition: Five Thoughts On The Hur Report
Wilmington, we have a problem
On Thursday, Robert Hur, the Republican special counsel Merrick Garland appointed to investigate how classified documents ended up in Joe Biden’s archives, issued his report. It clears Biden of criminal wrongdoing, but on the gratuitous and frankly revolting partisan grounds that even if Biden weren’t president, he’s simply too old and doddering to be convicted by a jury for willfully retaining classified information. The firestorm is still building among:
The Republicans who say (in bad faith) that, set against the prosecution of Donald Trump for stealing and concealing classified information, this proves there’s a double standard in the justice system;
The overlapping group of Republicans who say (also in bad faith) that this proves Biden is mentally unfit for the presidency; and
The national press corps, whose reporters have been salivating for any issue that will help them establish a false equivalence between Biden and Trump.
More on all of this in the coming days and weeks, I’m sure, but for now I wanted to sketch out a few thoughts.
Of all the leading Democrats and liberals who are ill suited to protect the country from dictatorship, Merrick Garland stands out as the worst. Between Supreme Court oral arguments over Trump’s qualification for office and the Hur report, today served as a reminder of Garland’s dithering in pursuit of top-level insurrectionists; his Hamlet-esque irresolution in determining who should investigate Trump, what he should be charged with, and where he should be tried; his blind-to-reality decision to hand what should have been an internal-affairs style review over sloppy document retention to a senior Trump Justice Department official; his negligent decision to leave the partisan attack lines about Biden’s age in the final report. I hope he searches his soul at length over these decisions, but I suspect he lacks the self awareness and/or has too much self-regard.
This doesn’t have to be an endless crisis for Biden, but he will have to undermine Hur’s credibility and prove him wrong. Others have observed he should sit down for a Super Bowl Sunday interview, and I agree, but I also think he can’t then recede from unscripted events once again afterward. If he can’t prove Hur wrong, we have big problems. But I suspect he can—and he can do it in a way that draws upon my view that he should do a better job working the media refs. They’d know Hur’s drawn a partisan caricature of Biden if they covered his public events with half as much slackjawed fascination as they shower on Trump’s every blathering utterance.
We all have a right to be angry with the rest of the Democratic leadership class, and its aversion to mining for and exploiting derogatory information about Trump. This has been an obvious, ongoing act of self-sabotage for years now. Simply observing it has caused me a great deal of personal and professional grief. But a Republican prosecutor called Biden too old to be a crook and everyone instantly recognized it as a disaster. Including the partisans who take umbrage whenever the Democratic Party’s good-faith critics ask leaders to confront Trump head on. Because at some level they know information is power. Because they know the GOP will exploit this information in a way Dems would never.
E.g., Trump owes his rape victim $90 million because he couldn’t stop defaming her. Democrats have taken approximately zero interest in it. Presumably they think their time is better spent on…immigration? Now it turns out Biden’s difficulty remembering the details of something that happened six years ago may be a political death sentence in the hands of an able opposition, and may even plunge America into dictatorship. There are a lot of lessons here, but one is that the party’s leaders and the consultant class that advises them are outmoded and need to be replaced.
The actual facts Hur seems to have unearthed about Biden’s awareness of the classified information in his archives are truthfully not great. Not disqualifying, and certainly nothing like Trump’s mass theft of state secrets. But if Biden really knew he had documents marked classified, and didn’t think they’d been declassified, it’s a real ding. Worse than Clinton’s email practices.
BONUS THOUGHT!
I take comparisons to James Comey up to a point. But Hur was special counsel, not an FBI investigator, and Biden is the president (who can’t be charged with federal crimes in office) not just a candidate. In circumstances like these, as at the end of the Mueller investigation, a “damning report” is theoretically fine: We can’t charge or even allege crimes, but we can leave an unflattering record for the future. Terms like “careless” are probably fine. Attacks on character or aesthetics, and the kinds of subjective impressions peppered throughout Hur’s report, are totally out of bounds.
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