Latest news with #classifiedDocuments
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Delayed Reckoning
Where does Robert Hur go to get his reputation back? The former federal prosecutor and special counsel investigating Joe Biden's retention of classified documents had been a target of vitriol from Democrats after the Justice Department released his report in February 2024. While Hur had recommended against the DOJ bringing criminal charges against Biden once he was out of office, his report describes the then-president coming across 'as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory' during his interview with Hur's team. At the time, the White House and Democrats accused Hur of engaging in politics, assisting Republicans who had been trying to make Biden's age an issue in the presidential campaign. Even Biden himself expressed his anger at Hur during a press conference hours after the report was made public. We all know what happened next. On June 27, on a debate stage in Atlanta, the whole world would see Biden as an aging president who frequently failed to speak audibly or coherently. Within a month, Biden had dropped out of the race, unable to gloss over what happened at the debate or ignore the increasing number of Democrats declaring publicly he was unfit to run again. Hur's description, once derided as unfair and partisan, had become impossible to deny. Hur was further validated last Friday when Axios published clips of the audio recordings from the interview. Listen to the clips to judge for yourself, but the audio strikingly captures Biden struggling to answer questions, leaving long gaps between words, searching for facts and dates, and otherwise sounding exactly as Hur described him. These new audio clips come after weeks of promotion of a new book out today from Axios reporter Alex Thompson and CNN anchor Jake Tapper, Original Sin, that offers new reporting about what the authors describe as a 'cover-up' of Biden's cognitive decline by Democratic Party figures and Biden's inner circle. The book has prompted discussion and some soul-searching from Democrats about everything from Biden's decision to run for reelection in the first place to his reluctant choice to withdraw. One Democrat is even reconsidering how he treated the sober and publicity-shy prosecutor who merely reported what he saw. (Hur, by the way, declined to answer questions for this column.) Tommy Vietor, a popular progressive podcast host who was once a trusted White House aide to Barack Obama, admitted in a post on X on Saturday that he had reevaluated his initial attack on Hur. 'I found the context about the Hur report to be some of the most interesting/revelatory information in ORIGINAL SIN,' Vietor posted. 'At the time, Hur's comments about Biden being an 'elderly man with a poor memory' seemed like Jim Comey-style inappropriate editorializing about a non-charging decision. However, the book made me realize how important that context was for Hur in explaining his decision NOT to charge Biden, and I now feel that many of the attacks on Hur, including by me, weren't totally fair.' As my colleague Sarah Isgur and I wrote at the time, Hur was obligated to explain to the attorney general in his report why he would not recommend charging Biden. Hur himself testified on Capitol Hill in March 2024 that he based part of this recommendation on the concerns he had that Biden's memory issues would make it difficult for the Department of Justice to win a criminal case. 'My assessment in the report about the relevance of the president's memory was necessary and accurate and fair,' Hur said in his testimony. 'Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe. I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly. I explained to the attorney general my decision and the reasons for it. That's what I was required to do.' This aspect of the report was not merely the fulfillment of the special prosecutor's duty but a red flag for anyone still in denial about the bigger truth: Biden was an octogenarian who had clearly declined while holding one of the most stressful and high-pressure jobs in the world. Democrats' dismissal of Hur's report as partisan agitprop delayed the reckoning the party needed to have. And by noting these uncomfortable facts about Biden, Hur and the Justice Department incurred the wrath of many liberals who were simultaneously seeking from the same justice system some form of deliverance from Donald Trump. Of course, Trump had done so much in both his first term and four-year interregnum to undercut faith in the institutions of criminal justice, infecting wide swaths of the Republican Party and conservative media. Meanwhile, overreach and malfeasance on the part of some liberal prosecutors have further eroded public trust wherever the law and politics come into contact. It's too much to hope that in this current moment of self-reflection by Democrats that partisans on both sides will recognize the cautionary tale in the panic over Hur's report. But they should.
Fox News
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
DAVID MARCUS: Old Man Biden's autopen pardons should be null and void
You may have noticed that there is a reckoning going on in the liberal media over the last month as journalists admit what everyone else already knew, that Joe Biden belonged in a nursing home, not the White House for most of his failed presidency. This week, at long last, we heard the audio from the sworn interview given by Biden to then-Special Counsel Robert Hur in the case of Biden's obvious mishandling of classified documents. It was two things everyone expected: damning and sad. The thing is, if we are finally admitting that Biden had less command of his faculties than Ivy League university presidents, then how can we allow any of his supposedly signed orders to stand? Most importantly, what are we to make of Biden's last-minute pardons, including one he swore he would never grant? Indeed, it is the underwhelming nature of what should be shocking audio that hammers home the point that Biden was unfit, that we all knew it, and that we must seriously question any and all ink spilled by his heavily used autopen. This is a smoking gun, but it was fired more than a year before the 2024 election. The rank smell of its duplicitous gunpowder was already wafting in the air as Democrats like Dean Phillips and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. pleaded for a real primary. These days, all the chastened and solemn Democrats on television swear they have learned a lesson, that if they had known then what we know now, Biden would not have been allowed to run. But those in a position to stop Biden did know then, and they continued to abuse the confused old man, anyway. So why were the people who did know that Biden wasn't fit to run a Wendy's so eager to keep him in the White House? Let's consider for a moment the fact that no top-level official was ever fired in the Biden administration, and not for lack of opportunity. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin oversaw a disastrous exit from Afghanistan and was not fired. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas let millions of illegal aliens flow across the border and was not fired. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said just days before Hamas launched its October 7 offensive that the Middle East was as "quiet as it had been in decades." He too, was not fired. The problem with the current reckoning going on over the lie of the century is that there are few consequences. Journalists aren't being fired, they are getting rich selling books in which they detail their own incompetence. Nice work if you can get it. You see, when the boss was upstairs struggling to get the lid off his tapioca pudding, the White House staff could do anything they wanted, no matter how harebrained, and there were no consequences. This brings us to the issue of Biden's pardons, especially those granted to his family and public figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci. Put simply, did Biden have any idea what he was doing when his autopen scratched the surface of those presidential papers? In the case of the pardon for his son Hunter, Biden is on the record just months earlier saying he would never ever do that. Sure, it's possible that he was lying, but he did give us his word as a Biden. If, as Democrats and their media allies insist, Biden's decline was so swift, starting in 2023, that it caught everyone off guard, then shouldn't we question whether the Joe Biden who signed Hunter's pardon wasn't deeper in the throes of dementia than the one who promised not to? The worst part of the mendacity from the Biden administration is that all those smarmy spokespeople like Ian Sams and all his bosses knew that the harm they were doing probably could not be undone, even if the actions were born of lies. They knew that, as a practical matter, it is likely impossible to deport 10 million illegal aliens, and they knew that it would be almost impossible to challenge Biden's pardons, even if he thought he was signing a pool pass for Corn Pop. The problem with the current reckoning going on over the lie of the century is that there are few consequences. Journalists aren't being fired, they are getting rich selling books in which they detail their own incompetence. Likewise, Hunter Biden, who is shadier than an apple orchard in a thunderstorm, is now free from all consequences. It's like none of his corruption or crimes ever happened. Maybe the Biden administration won this round with dirty tricks. Maybe no court can reverse these zombie pardons, but we won't know until we find out. If there are crimes to charge Hunter Biden with, he should be charged, and the same goes for Fauci. Let the courts decide if old man Biden was competent enough to make those calls. For now, there is every reason to believe that Biden's condition, which was hidden from us, makes his pardons, all of them, null and void.
Fox News
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
ALEX BERENSON: Why we need to humiliate Joe Biden
Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. was even more demented than we night, excerpts leaked from Biden's October 2023 interview with Robert Hur, the federal prosecutor who investigated him for possessing classified are awful. They show a man in severe cognitive decline. Biden couldn't recall even basic facts, like when elections are held. Yes, Joe Biden — who had lusted for the presidency his entire life — thought Donald Trump had won in November 2017, not 2016. It wasn't a verbal slip. He didn't know. An aide had to correct him. BIDEN REPEATEDLY SAYS 'I DON'T REMEMBER' REGARDING CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS IN NEWLY RELEASED HUR INTERVIEW AUDIOEven that summary doesn't capture Biden's he says is bad. How he says it is worse. His voice is weak and whispery. He goes silent for stretches, loses his train of thought, offers oddly emotional asides about his son Beau — though he could not remember when Beau died. He seems not to remember being vice president; he speaks of being a senator and then jumps to running for president. In the end, the classified documents investigation went nowhere. (Like the similar case involving Donald Trump, it shouldn't have). But along the way, Hur — a well-respected prosecutor who had been the U.S. Attorney for Maryland in Trump's first term — discovered something far more important: proof of Biden's incapacity. The Hur interview is so crucial because Biden and his handlers went to such lengths to protect Biden from press or public scrutiny even before the 2020 used teleprompters for his speeches, of course. His press conferences were rare and closely scripted. He had been told what questions would be asked in advance. Biden's few unscripted, live interactions visible to the public generally came when he left the White House to walk to Marine One. He would occasionally stumble over to the "gaggle" of reporters yelling questions at him and speak for a few seconds. Hur's interview with Biden was likely the only time during Biden's entire presidency when he faced lengthy questioning he could not control. It shows why Biden and his handlers tried so hard to avoid similar wrote in his report on the investigation last year that Biden was "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." The audio suggests that description was wouldn't trust the guy in this interview to drive to the grocery store. Biden had the nuclear worse, Hur interviewed Biden in 2023. If Biden and the people around him had had their way, he would have been president through January 2029. The interview suggests he'll be nearly vegetative by then — if he lives that the Justice Department released Hur's report on his investigation in February 2024, the legacy media immediately downplayed its importance and attacked Hur's motives. … the legacy media is only the second-most important villain was Biden and the people around him, most notably his wife Jill and son Hunter, who insisted that he was fit to serve, and would continue to be until he was 86. "In what is supposedly a legal document, these inclusions certainly looked gratuitous—to say the least," the New Yorker wrote in an article about Biden's "righteous fury" over the days later, the Washington Post would claim in a headline Hur had a "five-hour face-off" with Biden and write:"Hur's description of Biden's demeanor as that of a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" would infuriate Biden's aides, who saw it as sharply at odds with what occurred as the president sat for voluntary questioning."Sharply at odds, huh?I have written before about the media's dereliction of duty in covering Biden's decline, both before and after the Hur report, which continued until his disastrous June 27 debate in Atlanta made covering for him impossible. And I will come back to the media's failure. Hur's report made clear that Biden's cognitive impairment was severe and the White House was covering it up. That scheme should have been the story of the 2024 campaign from the moment the report became is not 20/20 hindsight on my part. On Feb. 9, 2024, the day the report came out, I wrote that it actually might be WORSE for Biden than an actual of the media looked the other way, even as Biden's flubs and lapses visibly worsened in the spring of 2024 despite the protective cocoon around him. But the legacy media is only the second-most important villain was Biden and the people around him, most notably his wife Jill and son Hunter, who insisted that he was fit to serve, and would continue to be until he was 86. Both Jill and Hunt had their reasons. Jill's lust for the trappings of power would be almost comic in its nakedness if it weren't so dangerous; Hunter has champagne taste and a beer budget (or, more accurately in his case, cocaine taste and a meth budget).But, of course, all of them, including Biden, knew the truth. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have gone to such great lengths to hide it. CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINIONImagine if Biden had won. Imagine if he had somehow found his way through his debates with Trump and then gone back to the presidential cocoon. Imagine if the media had insisted through Election Day that the videos showing his decline were merely "cheap fakes" - as it did throughout the spring. We'd be approaching a Constitutional crisis. Our system is not parliamentary; it has no way to replace an unfit President quickly or easily. And in running for a second term when he did not have to, Biden showed that he would not give up power unless he was forced to do Hur spoke truth to power. He's a hero. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPBiden and the people around him lied about his basic ability to function as he tried to convince American voters to give him the world's most important job for four more years. He shouldn't be forgiven. His misdeeds belong in the first line in his need to remember what he did, even if he can' HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO ALEX BERENSON'S "UNREPORTED TRUTHS"
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Audio of Biden's Special Counsel Interview Reveals Jarring Memory Lapses
The long-sought-after audio of Joe Biden's 2023 interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur has finally arrived. In the six-hour recording, extracts of which have been published by Axios, Biden repeatedly struggles to recall key dates, slurs his speech, and fumbles through long, uncomfortable silences. At one point, he fails to remember when his son Beau died. In another, he needs help identifying the year Trump was elected. The ticking of a grandfather clock in the White House's Map Room provides an eerie metronome to Biden's stumbles. 'I don't recall,' Biden says when questioned why he kept documents after his term as vice president. 'Did I have this? Was this in my possession, this memo?' The interview, part of Hur's investigation into Biden's improper retention of classified documents, had already provoked alarm for Hur's claim that a jury would likely view the then-president as 'a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.' While the transcript of the interview has been out for more than a year, now the public can judge that for themselves. Despite Biden's defenders insisting he was sharp and engaged, the audio released on Friday night paints a confronting picture. While Biden occasionally cracked jokes and rambled comically about Jay Leno and the Gutenberg printing press, he often veered off-topic and couldn't clearly explain how classified files ended up in his home. 'Am I making any sense to you?' Biden asked at one point during the discussion. Democrats, including then-Vice President Kamala Harris, had previously attacked Hur's characterization of Biden's age and mental state as 'gratuitous' and politically motivated. However, the tape's awkward pauses and meandering answers are already stirring anxiety in the party, especially with the upcoming release of Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, a new book by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson. 'I'm a young man, so it's not a problem,' Biden joked during the interview. The White House had fought the release of the audio, citing concerns over precedent and partisan misuse. But Republicans and conservative groups like Judicial Watch have argued that the public deserves to hear it. Now they can.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Biden Audio From Special Counsel Report Released, Features Memory Lapses
Audio from former President Joe Biden's interview in a damning special counsel report about his memory struggles is now out in the ether ... and it further shows Biden's memory lapses. Axios just released a portion of Biden's interview with former special counsel Robert Hur ... the clip is from a since-shuttered investigation into BIden's handling of classified documents, in which Hur concluded Biden was a "well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory." Biden was president at the time of the interview ... and he had trouble recalling dates and other important events ... namely, the year his son Beau died. In the clip, Biden also has trouble recalling when he left office as vice president and when Donald Trump was elected. The audio is from October 2023, when Biden was nearly 3 years into his presidency. The transcript from the interview was previously released, but this is the first time we're getting to hear Biden in the audio. As we reported ... Biden was asked about Hur calling out his "faulty memory" in February 2024 ... and he got feisty with reporters. Biden blocked the audio from being released while he was still president ... but now it's finally coming out.
