"It seems to me that Mr. Hur would be better served looking for a job as White House physician." Ari Melber last night on MSNBC
"Regarding the special counsel’s report on President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, could someone please explain what qualifies Robert Hur to diagnose memory problems? If the special counsel thought that the president’s memory was germane to making a legal determination regarding the handling of the documents, surely he could have subpoenaed and questioned a neurologist or a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing and treating memory disorders.
To use a legal term and analogy that Mr. Hur will understand, he did not have standing to include a medical opinion in his legal report.” - Letter writer, NY Times
The special counsel’s report about classified documents in President Biden’s possession has some echoes of James Comey’s exoneration of Hillary Clinton just before the 2016 election, calling her “extremely careless. This report seems even more egregious to me. I would go so far as to say that it appears to be a political hit job." - Letter writer, NY Times
That Special Counsel Robert Hur is a political hack like John Durham, sicced on Trump's investigators (by then AG Bill Barr) to find a counter point to the Mueller probe is now beyond doubt. Former DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weismann pulled no punches last night basically exposing Trump holdover Robert Hur as a two bit political hack. Just as Durham's pseudo investigation was done, and found to be hollow, e.g.
So also Hur's specious document witch hunt - done to balance out the legitimate one into Trump's own classified document crimes (at Mar-a-lago) - was found empty. Never mind all his blatant partisan hack editorializing about Joe's memory. Mr. Weismann made it clear (see at end) Hur - instead of treating the Biden docs case like Mike Pence's- ran off the DOJ professional guardrails with his irrelevant BS about Biden's memory and age. So Biden had every right to blast him in a news conference last night, and technically AG Garland ought to fire his ass for this deliberate partisan hit job on the incumbent president.
Hur's 345-page special counsel report portrays Biden, 81, as someone who haphazardly kept notebooks and documents with classified information at his home, and struggled to recall key dates in his life. Predictably, rodent Republicans quickly seized on that stinging characterization to attack the Democratic incumbent as unfit for office. The question is why was this aspect even included given Hur has no medical degrees. As Lawrence O'Donnell put it last night:
"What is a good test of memory? Might it be Donald Trump saying 'I don't recall' over four hundred times while taking a deposition? Might it be that witnesses over a 40 year time interval don't remember everything? Is it a person who graduates in June but can't recall where his diploma is in September? That seems to be the condition this special counsel doesn't understand about the human mind. And what is it that makes you stress a lack of memory in this particular case?"
As Ari Melber added on MSNBC last night, Hur's irrelevancies concerning Biden's memory also amounted to "cheap shots" with which I agree. (Janice called it a "hit job") It was the type of thing a hack would release, confusing the issue with irrelevant subjective dross and personal opinion. Instead of what should have been a black and white report: No adjectives, no adverbs ("painfully"), no editorializing. Especially over a critical election year in which low IQ media mavens and a selective attention public may well draw exactly the wrong conclusions.
Trumper special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report also said Biden "could not remember the year in which his son Beau died of cancer." This is total tommyrot given Joe and Jill preserve Beau's memory every year in a special personal memorial. So this humbug elicited a righteous blast from Joe in a presser that followed on the heels of the release:
"How in the hell dare he raise that,” a furious president Biden said to reporters summoned to the White House on Thursday evening. “It wasn’t any of their damn business. … I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.”
In an exchange with reporters (most of whom screamed like school children - something that never would have been allowed at a 1961-62 JFK press conference) the inane shouted questions from the peanut gallery veered from possible national security crimes to the president’s mental faculties to the ongoing U.S. response to the war in the Middle East, Biden insisted he never improperly shared classified information with anyone and was fit to be president and run for reelection. Ultimately, the report said a jury would find Biden to be a sympathetic figure and “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
This and other irrelevant elaboration elicited blasts and criticism from MSNBC legal specialist Andrew Weismann, who served as a special prosecutor in Robert Mueller's office. As Mr. Weismann observed:
"I look at this as someone who's worked in the Justice Department for twenty years and participated in writing reports like this, but without the adverbs. What you do as a prosecutor is look at intent and knowledge, you look for facts and cooperation. Here you have what is similar to the case of Mike Pence.
There is inadequate proof of any bad intent or knowledge or evidence of obstruction, and you have evidence of cooperation. That is why this case is like Mike Pence's case. And that should be the end of discussion.
What we have here, unfortunately, is a repetition of James Comey (with Hillary Clinton). The use of adverbs and adjectives that are not the province of the Department of Justice. That is not their role. It is completely irrelevant to the discussion. It is quite clearly a partisan swipe, which is literally on page one. How Joe Biden sees himself as a historic figure, comments about his memory. None of that is relevant because the whole issue here is proof that shows knowledge and intent to retain or disseminate classified information.
And the report says, 'no we don't'. In fact, it says there are innocent explanations that we cannot refute. That is the end. All the other stuff is a testament to somebody who was appointed a special counsel within the Department of Justice and who is not following the rules of the Department of Justice.
So you either put up or you shut up. Meaning you either decide you are going to charge or shut up. No one cares about your personal views of the evidence or the people involved."
In other words, Weissmann is saying Hur ran off the DOJ rails into hack-hood. He interjected personal, partisan views and speculations, elaborations about Biden which were totally irrelevant to the investigation. Worse the dumb media without any further examination or analysis is running with it like the leading editorial in today's WSJ, using Hur's detestable crank blatherings as a basis to attack Joe:
Biden’s Doddering Document Defense
Special counsel Robert Hur says a jury might not convict the elderly, forgetful President.
But which may now cost Joe the election and put a traitor back into power, especially if the Supreme Court does not side with Colorado in disqualifying the prick from running.
Thanks a heap, Hur!
Update: 3/12/ 24: Trump's Dog Hur To Testify - Don't Believe A Word
by Maya Boddie | March 12, 2024 - 6:06am | permalink
House Republicans are looking forward to, as of Monday, former Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur's testimony before the Judiciary Committee Tuesday, March 12 — weeks after the prosecutor decided against charging President Joe Biden over his handling of classified documents.
According to The Independent, Hur will testify "as a private citizen who has surrounded himself with Republican partisans and notorious figures linked to former president Donald Trump."
The Independent exclusively reports "multiple sources familiar with" the special counsel's plans, say that Hur, "at the request of the Republican majority led by Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, has arranged his departure from the Department of Justice to be official as of Monday 11 March, one day before he is scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill."
The special counsel's testimony, according to Axios, "gives Republicans their Mueller moment."
But at least Mueller had facts at hand including having already indicted 12 GRU agents! Hur has nothing, and has merely been Trump's- and now the GOP's pimp.
See Also:
PAUL KRUGMAN
The Disgusting Furor Over Biden’s Age
Conversations and insights about the moment. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Excerpt:
My God, consider his opponent. When I listen to Donald Trump’s speeches, I find myself thinking about my father, who died in 2013 (something else I had to look up). During his last year my father suffered from sundowning: He was lucid during the day, but would sometimes become incoherent and aggressive after dark. If we’re going to be doing amateur psychological diagnoses of elderly politicians, shouldn’t we be talking about a candidate who has confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and whose ranting and raving sometimes reminds me of my father on a bad evening?
So to everyone who’s piling on Biden right now, stop and look in the mirror. And ask yourself what you are doing.
And:
by Carl Gibson | February 10, 2024 - 8:26am | permalink
Excerpt:
If President Joe Biden wins a second term in November, he's not likely to keep Attorney General Merrick Garland in his current role, according to a new report.
Politico reported Friday evening that sources close to Biden who spoke anonymously to protect their positions say the president is privately "grumbling" about Garland's leadership of the Department of Justice. He's reportedly particularly upset about Garland's oversight of special counsel Robert Hur's and his hands-off approach to Hur's report summarizing the classified documents probe. Even though Hur ultimately ruled that no criminal charges were warranted, the special counsel — who was initially appointed as US Attorney for the District of Maryland by then-President Donald Trump in 2018 — made several unflattering observations about Biden's mental faculties that Republicans have seized on.
"This has been building for a while," one of Politico's sources said. "No one is happy."
When Biden first appointed Garland to helm the DOJ, he did so out of a sense of duty to restore the DOJ's reputation as independent of the presidency, telling Garland that "you are not the president or the vice president's lawyer." However, some Biden aides say that in his decisions to select Trump-appointed prosecutors as special counsels in both the classified documents investigation and the probe into Hunter Biden (led by US Attorney for the District of Delaware David Weiss), Garland's attempts to go out of his way to not appear biased often led to over-correcting toward conservative prosecutors.
"What Democrats do is they bend over backwards not to look partisan, and then they end up hiring people that are partisan but in the other direction,” an unnamed Biden donor told Politico.
And:
by Heather Digby Parton | February 10, 2024 - 8:13am | permalink
Excerpt:
Perhaps someday Democrats will learn their lesson but I'm not holding out much hope at this point. They suffer from an inexplicable habit of allowing only Republicans to hold the job of a special prosecutor. This has been going on for decades now and the results have been predictable each time.
For Democrats, the idea is to prove how noble and non-partisan they are in comparison to the hacks on the GOP side but it just ends up coming back to bite them in the end. 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, Jaworski was appalled by what he saw and issued subpoenas for Nixon's White House tapes, a case that eventually wound up in the Supreme Court. 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.
And:
by Robert Reich | February 9, 2024 - 8:32am | permalink
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Yesterday evening, special counsel, Robert K. Hur — appointed in January 2023 by Attorney General Merrick Garland to lead an inquiry into President Biden’s possible criminality after classified files were found in the garage and living areas of Biden’s home in Delaware — cleared Biden of any wrongdoing.
But Hur also suggested that one reason Biden could not be prosecuted was because of his memory lapses — thereby underscoring one of the biggest issues that the public is concerned about in re-electing Biden: His aging brain.
In recounting his interviews with Biden, Hur portrayed him as unable to remember key dates of his time in President Barack Obama’s White House.
Let me point out five things:
- Special counsel Hur has no professional background or experience diagnosing age-related memory loss. In fact, he has no medical background at all. His conclusion that Biden has a “poor memory” is entirely subjective, based on Hur’s own guess about how a jury would respond to Biden.
- Some memory loss naturally comes with aging, and both Biden (age 81) and his likely Republican opponent, Donald Trump (age 77) have demonstrated memory loss as well as confusion. (Trump recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, for example.)
- For the purposes of electing the next president, the relevant question isn’t a candidate’s memory. It’s his knowledge, temperament, and judgment.
And:
by Carl Gibson | February 9, 2024 - 8:11am | permalink
Excerpt:
Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur issued his final 388-page report on Thursday exonerating President Joe Biden from any criminal wrongdoing in his probe into whether Biden mishandled classified documents that were among his personal belongings. However, Hur still made several digs at Biden's age and mental fortitude, which the White House publicly condemned.
Hur — whom former President Donald Trump appointed as US Attorney for the District of Maryland in 2018 — stated that "no criminal charges are warranted in this matter." But he also described Biden as a "sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory," and noted that Biden was unable to remember some of his time as vice president under former President Barack Obama, and other details like the year his son, Beau, passed away.
In a recent tweet, White House spokesperson Ian Sams slammed Hur's characterizations of the president, saying "The inappropriate criticisms of the President’s memory are inaccurate, gratuitous, and wrong."
And:
Excerpt:
The Archives wasn’t even looking for the Biden docs, as they were with Trump’s top-secret materials, and didn’t know they had been missing until informed by Biden’s lawyers.
As Scott Frederickson also noted, this self-reporting was the single most important part of the situation which shows a lack of intentional conduct. This in distinction to the Mar a Lago case where there was an intentional attempt by Trump to hide documents.
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