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Special counsel Robert K. Hur, in a devastating 345-page report on his investigation into President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, concludes that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials.” But that is not his report’s real bombshell. Far more damaging is the picture it paints, in explaining Hur’s decision not to prosecute, of Biden as suffering from “diminished faculties” and “significant limitations” on his memory. So much so, the report says, that jurors would be unlikely to convict Biden because they would find him “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Most of us can judge Biden’s mental fitness only by his many struggles in public appearances - most recently forgetting the name “Hamas” while trying for about 30 painful seconds to articulate the state of hostage negotiations, referring to his recent meeting with a French president who died in 1996, and claiming to have discussed the Capitol riot with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died nearly four years before it took place.
We are left to wonder: If the president is this diminished in public, what is he like behind closed doors?
Well, the special counsel office’s report draws back the curtain and shows us. Based on its review of dozens of hours of recorded conversations between Biden, his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, and “on our direct interactions with and observations of him” during interviews with Justice Department lawyers, a deeply troubling picture emerges a man who at times seems incapable to conducting basic conversations.
“Mr. Biden’s memory … appeared to have significant limitations,” Hur writes, “both at the time he spoke to Zwonitzer in 2017, as evidenced by their recorded conversations, and today, as evidenced by his recorded interview with our office.
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” Hur continues. Biden “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.”
Hur concludes that jurors would likely find “Mr. Biden’s apparent lapses and failures” in sharing classified information with his ghostwriter in 2017 “consistent with the diminished faculties and faulty memory he showed in Zwonitzer’s interview recordings and in our interview of him.”
I am in no position to diagnose Biden, and neither are most Americans. But we see what we see - how his gait has stiffened and his ability to answer simple questions has declined. Which is why multiple polls show that 76% of American voters believe Biden is too old to effectively serve another term as president and 54% say he no longer has “the competence to carry out the job of president.”
That was based on his public appearances. But the special counsel’s description of his private interactions raises these concerns to Defcon 1. If the president is this confused in his meetings with Justice Department lawyers, how bad are his interactions with world leaders or his meetings with his own national security officials in the Situation Room?
Biden’s news conference Thursday, in which he angrily defended his mental acuity (“I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing”) only made things worse. He referred to President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi of Egypt as the “president of Mexico” and claimed the special counsel never said that he shared classified information when Hur’s report said he “disclosed classified materials.”
The president’s closest aides protect him, and foreign leaders wouldn’t publicly reveal any concerns about their discussions with him, for fear of damaging relations with the United States. But the special counsel has shown us Biden behind the scenes.
There are wars raging in Europe and the Middle East; U.S. forces are under attack in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea; the risk of war in the Pacific is growing; and rising numbers of people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list are trying to slip into the United States by illegally crossing the southern border. And apparently the commander in chief dealing with these overlapping crises is a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
We’re now beyond concern about whether Biden is fit to serve a second term; we should be concerned about whether he is fit to finish his first.