In 2016 we had But Her Emails. In 2024 we have Biden Is Too Old. The sources of these two lines haven't changed: the flailing GOP with an assist by bothsiderist news media.

Yes, it's the same old distraction technique to draw attention away from the leader of the Republican Party who is an adjudicated sex offender who just lost a gigantic lawsuit based on his past use of fraud.

It's time to push back and aggressively. And successful messaging is repetitious messaging – get used to repeating things if you wish to cut through the noise.

But the main thing is not to freak out and to play offense instead of being defensive. For example: Why are so few people on our side bringing up Trump's unhealthy lifestyle? Drinking 12 Diet Cokes® a day and copious chomping of double cheeseburgers wouldn't be recommended for somebody half his age. And what kind of drugs is he being prescribed?

[A]ll of the #BidenTooOld coverage is about as new and revelatory as #ButHerEmails. If nothing else, it proves that a scandal holding that the president forgets things is always going to go down smoother than a scandal in which a special counsel flagrantly violated a long-standing Justice Department practice and protocol not to “criticize uncharged conduct.” As Sullivan was quick to point out, CNN and the New York Times and every U.S. corporate media entity and its cousin jumped onto the bandwagon. [ ... ] Perhaps one way to navigate yourself through this seemingly insoluble morass would be to ask yourself why Biden, who is stipulated #Old, has managed to helm the most successful presidency in modern history. Booming economy, eye-popping jobs reports, first gun violence reduction bill in decades, $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan plus COVID relief, Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure prioritized, judges seated. Pick your metric—there have been a lot of wins. And the reason this old man who sometimes forgets things like dates has gotten all this done? He has, for the most part, surrounded himself with experts, genuine scientists, respected economists, and effective governmental actors and advisers. Governance is not an action film. There is no minute-to-minute psychodrama involving someone in a tight black T-shirt mincing along the outdoor ledge of a skyscraper, ninja-kicking his lonely way down to the stairwell, where he karate-chops the well-armed baddies and then commando crawls his way into an empty vault with the glass chest where the nuclear reactor sits. No. Despite our fascination with the Great Man theory of American lawmaking, the presidency is an office that largely turns on superb staffing, visionary planning, deft political negotiation, and artful execution. Joe Biden doesn’t actually have to remember every single detail himself—he has to use his judgment to employ and empower a large contingent of skilled experts to execute upon their agreed-upon vision. If you are unconvinced, the best evidence that we keep falling for Great Man fantasy propaganda is the unmitigated failure of the first Donald Trump presidency. Here we had a self-described loner literally trumpeting his I-alone-can-fix-it worldview, all embodied in Great Man megalomania. He managed to accomplish virtually nothing: Almost none of his promises for single-handed economic revitalization, world domination, or intrepid urban crime-solving panned out. His great dreams were either strangled in infancy by staffers or halted by courts. And whether you believe that this happened because Donald Trump surrounded himself with incompetent yes men or steely adults in the room, both versions serve to offer proof of concept: Donald Trump accomplished close to nothing because the people around him were either too inept to put his vision into practice or too skillful at blocking him to allow him to put his vision into practice. Put another way, if you or anyone you know finds themselves reacting to the Biden Is Old revelations with the thought that, sure, Donald Trump is a 91-indictments-richer, adjudicated sexual abuser, defamer, liar, violator of national security, self-enriching, fascist-boosting insurrectionist, but it’s OK because he will surround himself with people who might check those impulses—well, doesn’t it rather intuitively make more sense to instead vote for the highly effective, internationally respected, but yes, sometimes forgetty guy who is surrounded by people with day planners?

A president is a lot closer to being a CEO than a superhero. And when it does come to being businesslike, Trump has declared bankruptcy six times – approximately six more times than Biden. Trump's business "skills" lean heavily towards fraud, deceit, and bullying.

The real reason we all keep falling for Great Man horse race stories is because they are good for fueling fantasies of all-powerful big daddy presidents who control every tiny aspect of governance in their tiny wee hands. If that is your jam, well, it would make sense to vote for the only candidate who believes in the same dream. If it’s not, the question is reducible to rather simple stakes: Do you want the Big Daddy who surrounds himself with sycophants and nutters and people with shared last names, or the one who surrounds himself with competence and expertise? This doesn’t seem, on balance, like a really tricky call. Do we prefer presidents who can backflip and ninja-kick their way to total world dominion? Perhaps. To my knowledge, nobody ever made a Tom Cruise movie about listening and learning and compromising. But if you still believe governance to be a sober and serious enterprise, vote like the alternative is chilling, because it is.

Trump flatters himself as a "stable genius". But it is Biden who brought stable governance back to the US. Being a constantly ranting gasbag is not an indicator of competence.

Very little attention is being paid to psychological age. Trump is just 42 months chronologically younger than Biden, but Trump acts like a toddler who is not yet 42 months old.

Parents with kids who were constantly having temper tantrums and being frequently disruptive would consider taking those kids to a child psychologist. Being a disruptive narcissist in his late 70s does not make Trump seem youthful but instead more like a case study for arrested development as a toddler.

Tbh I'm getting really really tired of the "Trump and Biden are mentally unfit to be president, look at all these videos of them mixing up words and stuttering and mispronouncing stuff!" thing. Actually the whole "they're too old so they're unfit because they're unwell!" thing sucks imo. Maybe they're too old and so they can't be invested in what the future of the country needs, maybe they're too old and they're out of touch with what young people need, that's an age-related argument I'll listen to, although I think policy would be much much more important to talk about.

But the health/sanity stuff? Especially based around the way they speak? Or walk? Shut up. People with physical and neuro disabilities are not inherently incompetent. Trump slurs words and people say that's evidence he can't be president. We could have an amazing president with the worst stutter you've ever heard because that doesn't have shit to do with 95% of the job of governing. We could have an amazing president who can't walk and/or uses a wheelchair. FDR regularly used a wheelchair! Biden trips up the stairs and y'all are like haha he's so old he can't be president because he's bad at walking, do you hear yourselves?

I think this is one of those things where like Trump and Biden don't hear you making fun of their vocal/ambulatory oddities but aaaaaaall your friends with the same experiences do hear you, and you're telling on yourself regarding how you actually feel about disabled people. Think about this stuff!

If you're gonna criticize them, as you should, pick something meaningful. Don't harp on morally neutral things they and many many many other people can't control about their bodies. Come ooooooon

It's ashamed the President has to say this, but he is right. Don't vote for Trump, he is mentally unfit to be President.

Victor Davis Hanson

@VDHanson

President Biden—the Matter Is Not  Over, Not Now, Not Ever President Biden Thursday night hit rock bottom as he gave a mean-spirited distortion of the special counsel’s report. And in the process, Biden further embarrassed himself, his toady press, and the country at large. In sum, the press conference disintegrated into an embarrassing free-for-all. Note the following: 1. To prove that he is cognizant, and does not believe that some dead European leaders are still alive, Biden assured us that President el-Sisi of Egypt was actually the President of Mexico, and almost seemed to believe that the Gaza corridor to Egypt was on our southern border. The more he talked, the more he confirmed Hur’s conclusions. 2. Biden lost his temper and finally lashed out at the special counsel who all but ruined his own reputation by straining to find any reason not to indict a sitting president. Biden should have thanked him for using the mentally incompetent defense to keep a sitting president out of jail. 3. Weirdly, the usually comatose, obsequious White House press finally woke up Thursday night. It was embarrassing that the jig is up and sycophants want to reboot as journalists before they are utterly discredited for participating in one of the great farces of the age: namely, Joe Biden was never mentally fit and was used as an empty vessel and a supposedly moderate veneer for his hard-left controllers—the Obamas, the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing, and the Squad sorts. The con worked for three years but tonight it started to fall apart. 4. The media understands the self-created fix the Democrats are now in: Biden is either cognizant and thus according to the prosecutor likely guilty of violating national security laws, or he is cognitively challenged and therefore unfit to continue his presidency. Take your pick—dangerously demented or guilty of violating his nation’s national security laws? Or both? 5. Otherwise, Biden gave a very brief but characteristically disingenuous defense of his violations of the law, with his old ritual of trashing Trump. In fact, the Biden and Trump cases are as different as they are similar: Mar-a-Lago is a far more secure location than Biden’s garage; Biden had no prerogative to declassify documents unlike President Trump; Biden took out the files for over a decade, Trump for less than two years; It was not Biden’s civic virtue that led to disclosure of the files, but the Biden Justice Department’s effort to turn a bureaucratic/civil dispute over classified presidential papers into a criminal indictment of Trump. That move prompted a cynical preemptive effort to avoid the charge of hypocrisy, given inevitably Biden's years-long violations would then logically come to light. 6. Biden flat-out lied about the Hur report. It did repeatedly document that Biden was mentally challenged; it said unequivocally that Biden willfully knew he was breaking the law by removing classified documents; and it noted specifically that the Afghan materials were in fact classified as “top secret”. Biden is a pathological prevaricator and lied every time he referenced the Hur report. 7. Screaming, insulting, blaming staff, claiming he had to focus on presidential business, self-righteous—all that scapegoating only further convinced the country that the Biden classified files scandal is not over. It is a spark to a fire that is about to burn out of control. God save us all.

Pete Buttigieg RIPS Trump with HILARIOUS comeback during hearing

During a House Transportation hearing, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg clapped back at Rep. Troy Nehls who went on a bizarre rant about President Biden's mental fitness. Ironically, by the end of the back and forth, it was Nehls who seemed mentally unfit to serve in the United States Government. Francis Maxwell reports!

A lot of Democratic leaners, independents, and anti-Trump Republicans who believe that Biden is too old and mentally unfit to serve another four years will ultimately hold their noses and vote for him. But the last election was close. This election will be too. Trump has as good a chance as anyone of winning it.

Maybe still be afraid of Donald Trump winning the presidency?

[The Daily Don]

* * * *

THOUGHTS REGARDING TODAY

TCINLA

AUG 2, 2023

On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln asked the essential question about this constitutional democratic republic:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

That is the essential question: How long can a self-governing republic endure before it is torn apart by internal dissension?

Every other Republic in history before the United States was founded has self-destructed.

We have in our own lifetimes seen other republics fall to anti-democratic authoritarian movements and their leaders, popularly supported by at least a significant minority of that nation’s citizens.

This is an extraordinary day. There has never been one like it in our lifetimes in terms of importance to the country. Today it was reaffirmed that no one is above the rule of law, and that includes a president who committed the crime of attempting to destroy the government he had been elected to lead and had sworn to protect.

No other country has successfully prosecuted a criminal of the dimensions of Donald Trump; there has not existed the national will, the political cohesion, the strength of the rule of law to accomplish such an act.

Such events led to the most terrible war in the history of humans on this planet; it took nearly the entire population of the planet to change that result and hold one of these Great Criminals and the movement he led to account for their crimes against humanity.

If we accomplish this, we will truly be the Exceptional Country. The one and only country to demonstrate that the strength of our national character and the power of our commitment to the rule of law is sufficient to deal with this crisis.

The indictment reads: “The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. As described in the indictment, it was fueled by lies – lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

The Trump campaign responded thus to the indictment: “This is nothing more than the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election, in which President Trump is the undisputed frontrunner, and leading by substantial margins.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, 2024 GOP contender responded: “As President, I will end the weaponization of government, replace the FBI Director, and ensure a single standard of justice for all Americans. While I’ve seen reports, I have not read the indictment. I do, though, believe we need to enact reforms so that Americans have the right to remove cases from Washington, DC to their home districts. Washington, DC is a ‘swamp’ and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality. One of the reasons our country is in decline is the politicization of the rule of law. No more excuses – I will end the weaponization of the federal government.”

This is a sad day, a day when we have to ask ourselves how a man so manifestly and obviously unfit to hold any elected office was elected to the highest office we have. How has our country failed to educate a significant minority of the citizens to hold the democratic constitutional republic as the sacred trust that it is?

This is also a great day because this Great Criminal has been held to account for his crimes.

Fortunately, this Great Criminal by his 2016 victory awakened the rest of us from our slumber, from our thoughtless assumption that “it can’t happen here.” It most obviously happen here and came within 44,000 votes in 2020 of becoming the permanent end of this experiment in self rule.

If we do not do everything possible to prevent its return, 2024 will definitely mark that end.

Donald Trump was an armed robber. He attempted, by violence, to rob us of our right to choose our leaders in free and fair elections (or elections as close to that ideal as we can achieve).

It is clear that there is a political party that favors an assault on democracy. That party, so long as it is led by the current authoritarians, cannot ever be allowed to take any degree of national power until that condition has ended.

In 1787, upon completion of the work of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what had been created.

He answered, “A Republic - if you can keep it.”

The responsibility of keeping it is in the hands of all of us, where it has always resided.

We can no longer assume anything about its continued existence.

As with everything else, it’s up to us.

Today is a sad day that this happened. It is a great day that we have awakened to the threat and shown ourselves capable of keeping this republic.

Rich Pletcher posted:

There are people who claim Trump is mentally unfit to be the president.

Curiously, these are the same people who:

- Cringe in fear when someone wears a red hat.

- Have had three years of insomnia because Trump was elected.

- Have their mental stability upset by hearing a word they don't like.

- Are driven to extremes - either violence or complete isolation (safe spaces) when hearing an opposing position or idea.

- Create new definitions and meanings for words and phrases to fit their mood.

- Re-frame words and actions to mean exactly the opposite of what they mean.

- Ignore context and reality to redefine their opponent's statements and actions in the worst way possible.

- Conflate and amplify simple, innocuous actions into scandals.

- Adopt a philosophy of double negatives - for example: being "intolerant of intolerance" actually means tolerance of everything.

- Will believe literally anything that confirms their bias, no matter how implausible, absurd, ridiculous or impossible it is.

- Are able to live with the schizophrenia caused by cognitive dissonance - holding diametrically opposed ideas in their minds.

- Can't decide which gender they are.

- Are only capable of emotional reasoning - basing their "rightness" on how upset they are. The more upset, the more correct - even when there is no factual support for their position.

- Will only reason to a level of emotional satisfaction - they stop analyzing any issue when they achieve a point that makes them feel good.

- Have so little self-awareness as to be the people they claim to hate.

And yet, these are the people who claim it is their right to lead, that they can stand up to the mean old Putin and will protect us from China's technological, economic and military ambitions.

These people don't belong in the White House, they belong in a mental institution.

Bernie will be 83 on Election Day 2024 and people are still asking if he wants to run for President, when DiFi was planning to run for re-election last time people were basically like "aren't you basically dead? how could you possibly still be alive at the end of 6 years" and she was the same age... likewise all the talk about Nancy Pelosi and her age (82) while people talk about Joe Biden as the oldest President ever (80) its no where near as serious and universal as the Pelosi talk and I expect once he says (formally) he's up for a second run it'll just go away, and of course no one ever mentioned that Trump was the oldest American President

I think what gets me is that there are some valid concerns about aging - the presidency and most political positions are incredibly demanding, both mentally and physically, and it's not like things are getting easier.

However, people also act like once you're over 50, you're basically mostly incapable and unfit for anything (unless they like you in which case you're the exception to the rule) and women definitely get this treatment more than men do (which is kinda funny since statistically men tend to die younger/sooner than women do).

There is a lot of emphasis in the news media on Biden's age while almost nothing about Trump's fitness. This needs to change and we should be more active about holding news organizations to account.

In a four day period in September, the cable news stations mentioned Biden’s age 193 times while Trump’s age was mentioned just 56 times. (MediaMatters.org on September 29, 2023.) After this one sided coverage, these same media outlets then polled the voters about Biden’s age and found (surprise!) that voters are more concerned about Biden’s age than Trump’s age. It’s garbage in and garbage out.

There's just a 3.5 year difference between Biden and Trump. But Trump is not the fitter of the two. Being an epic blowhard and blabbermouth is not a measure of fitness.

After Biden concluded his debt ceiling deal with McCarthy in June, the extremist so-called House “Freedom” Caucus members complained that Biden “outsmarted” McCarthy in the negotiations. The House GOP’s most extreme members hate Biden and have zero incentive to tell the truth about Biden’s good state of health.

So even the most extreme Republicans had to admit that they were outfoxed by Biden.

On October 2, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) took to the floor of the House to denounce the deal that funded the government for forty five days Gaetz said: “It is going to be difficult for my Republican friends to keep calling President Biden feeble while he continues to take Speaker McCarthy’s lunch money in every negotiation.”

As for Trump's health, mental health in particular, the evidence of his debility is on full display.

Meanwhile, the mainstream press has largely ignored and downplayed Trump’s declining mental condition and increasing tendency to threaten violence. Probably the only mainstream media piece that accurately described the respective health of Biden and Trump was in the New York Times on June 4, 2023. The pertinent excerpts are as follows: “While in office, Mr. Trump generated concerns about his mental acuity and physical condition. He did not exercise, his diet leaned heavily on cheeseburgers and steak and he officially tipped the scales at 244 pounds, a weight formally deemed obese for his height. After complaining that he was overscheduled with morning meetings, Mr. Trump stopped showing up at the Oval Office until 11 or 11:30 a.m. each day, staying in the residence to watch television, make phone calls or send out incendiary tweets. During an appearance at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he had trouble lifting a glass of water and seemed to have trouble making his way down a modest ramp. Most striking was Mr. Trump’s cognitive performance. He was erratic and tended to ramble; experts have found that he had grown less articulate and that his vocabulary had shrunk since his younger days. Aides said privately that Mr. Trump had trouble processing information and distinguishing fact from fiction. His second chief of staff, John F. Kelly, bought a book analyzing Mr. Trump’s psychological health to understand him better, and several cabinet secretaries concerned that he might be mentally unfit discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him.”

He's gotten worse rather than better since leaving office.

These aren’t isolated statements. The highlights (or lowlights) of Trump’s deteriorating condition are as follows. Trump forgot who is currently president, and claimed “the Obama administration” recorded the length of his “border wall.” He even claimed **Jeb Bush** invaded Afghanistan and Iraq! Trump appeared confused when he said Jeb Bush was president during the Iraq War. “You know he was a mili — he got us into the, uh, he got us into the Middle East … Right?” In September, Trump mixed up Biden and Obama, and claimed Biden might start World War TWO. Trump even said you need a government photo ID to buy a loaf of bread. At the same time, Trump’s remarks have taken a dark turn and he has repeatedly threatened violence. Trump suggested that General Mark Milley should be executed. If anybody else had said that, they would be getting a visit from the FBI. The fact that this isn’t being treated as major front-page news is astonishing to me.

Trump makes threats to media moguls and they go easy on reporting his delirium.

The run away front runner for the GOP presidential nomination said Comcast, the owner of NBC and MSNBC, “should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason’” and promised to do so should he be re-elected president next year. Why does the press continue to cover up Trump’s poor health when he has promised to go after them? How can they be so stupid? It’s pretty wild that, of the two leading presidential candidates, the guy found liable for rape and who is facing ninety one criminal indictments isn’t the one who is facing calls to step aside for someone else to run. The mainstream media has lost all sense of scale and proportion. The media fixation with Biden as opposed to this clearly impaired guy is journalistic malpractice.

Psychologist Mary Trump, Donald's niece, called her uncle a "dangerous presence" on Australia's ABC earlier this year. She also said he was essentially "an insecure little boy who seeks attention".

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Ask your news providers why they are seldom mentioning Trump's mental health in their coverage. They should not be normalizing his threats against people and his bizarre erratic comments.

Bolsonaro: Brazil's polarizing far-right president

Four years after storming in to shake up a Brazil disgusted with politics, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro finds it increasingly hard to cast himself as an outsider, but remains as vitriolic and polarizing as ever.

Seeking re-election for a new four-year term Sunday, the 67-year-old incumbent is trailing in the polls to his leftist nemesis, ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003-2010).

Known for a brash, divisive style that earned him the nickname "Tropical Trump," Bolsonaro, an ex-army captain turned congressman, surged to national prominence in 2018 by playing to voters disgusted with Brazil's economic implosion and the massive "Car Wash" corruption scandal that stained a laundry list of bigwigs in the worlds of business and politics, particularly Lula's Workers' Party.

When Bolsonaro survived a knife attack during a campaign rally that September -- perpetrated by an assailant who was later declared mentally unfit to stand trial -- it only fueled followers' belief in their "Messias," or "Messiah" -- Bolsonaro's middle name.

But the aura of invincibility around the president has faded as he enters the twilight of his term with the economy sputtering and his popularity flagging.

Continue reading.

'Feeble, desperate, mentally unfit': Biden changes tack to mock <b>Trump</b> - The Guardian

New Post has been published on https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/30/biden-insults-trump-campaign&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjUzM2UwMTY5ZmFhZTIwMGQ6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AOvVaw0yaf6lj5MJW_Tojkj1SsUn

'Feeble, desperate, mentally unfit': Biden changes tack to mock Trump - The Guardian

The Republican contender lowered the tone of electoral politics in 2016 – now the Democratic president has left the high road to take him on at …

Why Robert Hur Called Biden An “Elderly Man With A Poor Memory”

In His First Interview After the Release of His Controversial Report, the Former Special Counsel Insists That it Was Not His Job to Write For the Public.

— By Jeannie Suk Gersen | Friday March 22, 2024 | The New Yorker

Illustration By Nicholas Konrad/The New Yorker; Source Photographs From Getty

When I first approached Robert Hur for an interview, soon after his appointment as special counsel, fourteen months ago, he demurred, saying, “I’m boring.” Then his circumstances changed. When we finally met, he pulled up in an armored black government S.U.V., accompanied by two U.S. marshals. Hur had completed his report on whether President Joe Biden had mishandled classified documents—he had declined to prosecute Biden but had impugned the President’s memory in the process—and members of both parties were furious. “I knew it was going to be unpleasant,” he told me this past week, “but the level of vitriol—it’s hard to know exactly how intense that’s going to be until the rotten fruit is being thrown at you.”

Hur’s report stated that his investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice-presidency when he was a private citizen.” Yet Hur concluded that “the evidence does not establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” He reasoned that “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” In Hur’s view, “it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

The report was designated confidential, but the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, had already promised to make as much as possible of it public. When he did so, on February 8th, Biden immediately held a press conference, which turned chaotic. Reporters yelled over each other, and Biden pushed back on Hur’s characterization of him, saying, “I’m well-meaning and I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing.” The President was particularly incensed by Hur’s claim that he did not recall what year his son Beau had died: “How in the hell dare he raise that.” Afterward, the White House continued to fight back, calling the references to the President’s memory “unnecessary, inflammatory, and prejudicial statements” that are “unsupported personal opinion criticism on uncharged conduct that is outside the Special Counsel’s expertise and remit.” (The Justice Department immediately defended Hur’s report as entirely consistent with legal requirements and Department policies.)

This past week, during a four-hour hearing in Congress, lawmakers from both political parties rebuked Hur. Republicans accused him of going easy on the President by not charging him despite the evidence of criminality; Democrats alleged that, because Hur could not indict the President, he had set out to hurt Biden politically. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, claimed that Hur had deliberately played “into the Republicans’ narrative that the President is unfit for office because he is senile.”

During his time as special counsel, Hur refused to speak to the press, but, shortly after he gave his congressional testimony, we sat down for a conversation, in which we spoke about his approach to prosecution, his commitment to the United States as the son of Korean immigrants, and why he took the special-counsel job. As we delved into how he wrote the report—and I shared some of my own concerns about his approach—it became clear to me that we were talking across something of a disconnect, between what the public needs from a special counsel and how a well-trained Justice Department prosecutor conceives of the role.

From the beginning, the investigation into President Biden has been double-edged: it was always about both Biden and Donald Trump. In September, 2022, after the F.B.I. found that Trump had taken boxes of classified documents from the White House and stored them at Mar-a-Lago, Biden called Trump’s conduct “totally irresponsible.” Two months later—shortly before the special counsel Jack Smith was appointed to investigate Trump’s alleged election interference and retention of classified documents—Biden’s lawyers alerted the government that boxes of materials from the Obama Administration had been found at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank where Biden spent time after his Vice-Presidency. The boxes contained some classified documents, and subsequent searches found more, at Biden’s Wilmington home and at the University of Delaware. In January, 2023, without informing the President, Garland appointed Robert Hur to investigate Biden’s retention of classified documents.

According to Justice Department regulations, a special counsel must be a lawyer selected from outside the federal government “with a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking” and “appropriate experience.” Hur was an obvious choice. At fifty-one, he had spent a total of fifteen years at the Justice Department, including roles as the top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—which involved work on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election—and as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland. Hur, a registered Republican, was nominated to the U.S. Attorney role by Trump (and confirmed unanimously by the Senate), but he insists that he does not have a partisan mind-set. “I’m just doing the work,” he told me. “I don’t have a particular ideology or crusade that I’m trying to go after.” When news broke of his appointment as special counsel, many of his friends, Democrats and Republicans alike, were supportive but said it was a little crazy to take such a thankless job. It was guaranteed that “this part of the country, or that part of the country,” he said, raising his arms to shape the two swaths, would be angry with him.

I asked Hur why he accepted the appointment. He explained that much of it had to do with his family’s history. His mother’s family fled from North Korea to South Korea shortly before the Korean War. Hur’s parents arrived in the U.S. in the early seventies, and he was born soon after. His father, now retired, was an anesthesiologist, and his mother, who trained as a nurse, managed her husband’s medical practice. “I know that my parents’ lives and my life would have been very, very different if it were not for this country and American soldiers in Korea during the Korean War,” Hur said. “There is a real debt that my family and I have to this country. And in my view, if you’re in a position where the Attorney General of the United States says there is a need for someone to do a particularly unpleasant task, if it’s something that you can do, ethically and consistent with your own moral compass, then you should do it.”

Hur grew up in the Los Angeles area, where he attended Harvard School for Boys (now a coed school called Harvard-Westlake). He recalled that the actor Tori Spelling was at the sister school: “There were lots of Hollywood people. I felt very much an outsider from all of that because of my strict Korean upbringing.” He explained, “It was quite stern. Excellence was expected. Fun was severely optional.” He played piano and violin. “I played drums, too, for a while,” he said, “because that was my form of rebellion.”

Hur went to Harvard for college, where, he said, he was “regularly floored by how effortlessly classmates of mine could become fluent in things that took me quite a while to get on top of.” He continued, “I’ve never been the person whom people look at and say, ‘That person is a rare generational brain.’ But I’m going to work harder and grind it out.” He started out studying premed but was “weeded out” by a course in organic chemistry. He went on to study English, and wrote a thesis that was “an ethical analysis of William Faulkner’s ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ ” Hur traces his interest in literature to his high-school English teachers, who included the journalist Caitlin Flanagan. Flanagan remembers Hur, too—she recently chided him on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” saying, “As I taught Robert and so many students fortunate enough to benefit from my tutelage, when writing, the most important thing in an essay is we keep related ideas together.” She continued, to big laughs from the studio audience, “Robert, the assignment is ‘Should criminal charges be issued for this thing?,’ not ‘Can you give us an armchair neurological report of the man you’re investigating?’ ”

Contrary to the stoic persona he displayed at the congressional hearing, Hur is lively and humorous in person. But I couldn’t help but connect his self-described fun-optional upbringing—and the unspoken pressures of being the first nonwhite person in this very prominent job—with his insistence that his work as a prosecutor is plodding and not creative. “I view it almost like an engineering task or a construction task. I am building a case,” he told me. “There are planks and nails and hammers. How does this thing get built with the requisite solidity and seaworthiness that it actually will hold up?” His goal, as special counsel, was to call as little attention to his work as he could. He resigned before his congressional testimony, he explained, simply because his predecessors had. “Look, if Mueller did it this way, then there must be some reasons,” Hur said. “I don’t want to make history here.”

Hur’s report was refreshingly blunt and direct, but it still led to misunderstandings. The White House and Democrats have managed to spin his conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to convict Biden as something separate from his observations about memory and forgetting. Republicans who wanted Biden to be charged are similarly motivated to see the two issues as distinct, so that they can depict him as both criminal and senile. But the failing-memory issue was not extraneous to the evidence in this criminal matter; indeed, it was integral to Hur’s decision to not recommend indicting Biden. Hur concluded that the evidence is not sufficient to convict Biden in large part because of his memory.

The federal crime for which Biden was being investigated makes it a felony for a person who has “unauthorized possession” of a document “relating to the national defense” to “willfully retain” it. After Biden left the Vice-Presidency, in 2017, he was no longer authorized to possess classified documents. Hur found—and Biden has not disputed—that Biden did possess them, at his home and offices. The only open question in this investigation was whether his retention of the documents was “willful.” The answer would have been a clear, easy, and resounding “no” if Biden was unaware that classified documents were in his home or office, or if he discovered them and promptly reported their presence. The trouble is that Hur’s evidence included an interview recorded in 2017, in which Biden told a ghostwriter, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” Hur also found, on recordings, that Biden read aloud classified information from a notebook to the ghostwriter “on at least three occasions.”

Given these findings, one has to wonder why Hur didn’t charge Biden. Based on my reading of Hur’s report and conversations with him, the answer is that Hur believed that Biden—who certainly knew that he possessed classified documents in 2017—may have forgotten about them. The report points to where some documents were found: “in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket,” and so on. This, the report notes, “does not look like a place where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy.”

Then There are Hur’s Observations that Biden’s “Memory was Significantly Limited”—That, in Interviews with Hur and the Ghostwriter, He Displayed “Limited Precision and Recall.” After reading the transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden, many Democrats noted with relief that the President remembered a lot: from the details of a home renovation to a 2011 visit to Mongolia. Reading the transcript, I was at first surprised that his attorneys had let him ramble to that extent—having represented clients in interviews with federal prosecutors, I wanted to bury my head in my hands. At one point, Hur even said to Biden, “Sir, I’d love—I would love, love—to hear much more about this, but I do have a few more questions to get through.” But I eventually surmised that Biden’s lawyers had been right to allow him to make the impression of a highly likable man with diverting stories and fuzzily selective recall. My impression, from examining the evidence of his conduct regarding the classified documents, is that Biden came uncomfortably close to being indicted. Hur’s most damning words—that a jury would perceive the President as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” and thus be unlikely to convict—seem to have saved him from that outcome.

In Congress, Hur defended his report’s discussion of Biden’s memory by saying, “I had to show my work.” In our conversation, I suggested to Hur that he might have been able to avoid some misunderstandings if he had shown his work even more. Hur’s report rolled the prosecution case and the defense case together into a realism-oriented prediction of what an eventual jury could conclude—that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” I proposed that he might instead have laid out, step-by-step, as one would for a law student, how the evidence he found went to each element of the crime, including the key element of willfulness. He might then have drilled down on how the defense—which had already emphasized to Hur that Biden forgot about the classified documents—could successfully undermine proof of willfulness with arguments about Biden’s memory, bolstered by his likely demeanor at a trial years from now. Hur told me, “I didn’t write it for law students. I didn’t write it for the lay public, and I didn’t write it for Congress. I wrote it for the Attorney General of the United States, who himself was an experienced prosecutor.” Hur was aware that Garland had said he was “committed to making as much of his report public as possible, consistent with legal requirements and Department policy.” But Hur insisted that his audience was still Garland alone, citing a regulation which states that the special counsel should prepare a confidential report for the Attorney General.

A confidential report that everyone understands will become public seems like a paradox, but it reflects the long-standing norms and blinkered training of people who do the job of special counsel. Hur worked the case like he would any other criminal investigation, and he wrote his report in the way he would have written many memos as a federal prosecutor. But the potential defendant he was investigating was the President of the United States. At the hearing in Congress, Hur refused to “engage in hypotheticals,” but he has previously prosecuted people for the same crime, including an N.S.A. employee who kept classified documents in his home and was convicted and sentenced to more than five years in prison. Hur’s decision not to charge Biden was based on the view that he could not realistically persuade a jury to convict not just any defendant but this particular President. The job was inevitably special. And its special obligation—to undertake a federal investigation of the boss who oversees the Justice Department, an inherent conflict of interest, while maintaining public trust—can come into conflict with the D.O.J.-molded circumspection that characterizes special counsels and certainly came through in my interview with Hur.

The White House has attacked Hur’s report with the goal of winning the Presidential election—but, in doing so, may have put Biden at greater risk of prosecution in a future Trump Administration. The more Democrats insist that Biden is in fact sharp as a tack, the more they suggest that he may have been guilty of “willfully” retaining classified documents that he knew he wasn’t authorized to have. And, conversely, the more Republicans insist that Biden is “senile”—though Hur never used that word, nor the word “unfit”—the less likely he is to have willfully retained the documents. For both parties, the political and legal risks point in opposite directions.

Biden and Trump, however, are in certain respects aligned in their legal defenses. In his report, Hur appeared to think that jurors would be convinced that Biden sincerely believed his notebooks containing classified information were his personal property. (In the interview, Biden noted that Ronald Reagan kept diaries containing classified information in his home after leaving the Presidency, without having been investigated or required to return them.) Trump has also claimed that classified documents he retained were his personal property, and the parts of Hur’s report that seem lenient toward Biden’s “my property” notion may throw a bit of a lifeline to Trump’s defense. Indeed, it wouldn’t be outlandish for Trump’s defense attorneys to subpoena Biden to testify as to his belief that he was entitled to keep notebooks containing classified information. (As a matter of law, there is no relevant distinction between notebooks containing classified information and documents that are marked classified.)

Hur declining to prosecute Biden has another implication for Trump’s defense. At trial, Trump’s attorneys may well be able to present him, too, as an old man with mental impairments that undermine the prosecution’s proof of willfulness. Trump is only a few years younger than Biden—and, in 2017, a broad perception that Trump suffered from mental deterioration led Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman and former constitutional-law professor, from Maryland, to propose establishing a body to determine that the President was unfit for office. (At this month’s hearing on Hur’s report, Raskin rebuked Republican colleagues for “being amateur memory specialists giving us their drive-by diagnoses of the President of the United States.”) If Jack Smith’s case against Trump goes to trial, it would be surprising if Trump’s attorneys didn’t raise his impairment in his defense, especially now that we have the Justice Department precedent of declining to prosecute an elderly President based on what a jury would likely think of his memory. Smith would probably insist that Trump’s mind and memory are just fine. There may be uncomfortable moments for Biden if the Trump case goes to trial, with the Justice Department all but claiming that Trump’s mental faculties are superior to Biden’s.

Hur’s conclusion, as spelled out in his report, was ultimately not that Biden’s memory is actually failing (or abnormal for a man his age). It was, rather, a trial lawyer’s assessment that a jury, with persuasion from defense lawyers, might not be able to rule out that Biden just forgot he had the documents. But that imagined jury has a lot in common with us as voters, distressed about our choices and concerned about the candidates’ age. Biden in particular is perceived even by a majority of Democrats as too old to be President. Hur himself was tight-lipped about how the report resonated with the public. But, whether we are talking about Biden or Trump, Hur’s report has forced us to contemplate voting for a candidate while believing that he is impaired enough to fall short of a “willful” mental state. Perhaps Hur, while doing a thankless public service, also offered a generational lament at our gerontocratic government. ♦

Robert K. Hur serves as Special Counsel with the U.S. Department of Justice. In January 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Mr. Hur to conduct the investigation of the possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents discovered at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and the Wilmington, Delaware private residence of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

Before his appointment, Mr. Hur was a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and Co-Chair of the Firm’s Crisis Management Practice Group. A seasoned trial lawyer and advocate, he brought decades of experience in government and in private practice, including service in senior leadership positions with the U.S. Department of Justice, to guide companies and individuals facing white-collar criminal matters, regulatory proceedings and enforcement actions, internal investigations, and related civil litigation. He was also a member of the firm’s White Collar Defense and Investigations Practice Group and the National Security Practice Group.

Before joining Gibson Dunn, Mr. Hur served as the 48th United States Attorney for the District of Maryland. Presidentially appointed and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he served from 2018 to 2021 as the chief federal law enforcement officer in Maryland, setting strategic priorities for and supervising one of the largest and busiest U.S. Attorney’s Offices in the nation. Before serving as U.S. Attorney, Mr. Hur served as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General with the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. from 2017 to 2018.

Mr. Hur received his J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he served as Executive Editor of the Stanford Law Review, was elected to the Order of the Coif, and won the Kirkwood Moot Court Competition. He served as a law clerk for William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States, and Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Mr. Hur received his A.B. degree, magna cum laude with highest honors, from Harvard College and studied philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge.

Biden jokes about Trump’s ‘mental illness’ at traditional Washington dinner - Al Jazeera English

* Biden jokes about Trump’s ‘mental illness’ at traditional Washington dinner  Al Jazeera English * President Biden jokes about Trump at Gridiron dinner in Washington  The Washington Post * 2024 Election Live Updates: The Latest on Trump and Biden on the Campaign Trail  The New York Times * Biden Jokes About His Age, Trump at Annual Washington Gridiron Dinner  The Wall Street Journal * Biden says at DC roast that of 2 presidential candidates, 1 was mentally unfit. ‘The other’s me.’  The Boston Globe

LET ME BE ABSOLUTELY FUCKING CLEAR!!!! BIDEN IS NOT PERFECT, HE’S CLEARLY TRYING TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT FOR PALESTINE AND FOR THE PEOPLE IN GAZA, WHILE TRUMP—-HE IS MENTALLY INCAPABLE AND UNFIT FOR THE WHITE HOUSE!!!! IF TRUMP IS RE-ELECTED PRESIDENT, WE’RE TOTALLY FUCKED!!!! AND IT’LL BE BECAUSE OF YOU PEA-BRAINED SELFISH FUCKS FOR VOTING NON-COMMITTAL!!! THIS IS THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF THIS COUNTRY!!!!! AND YOU WANT TRUMP BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE—AFTER WHAT HE DID ON JANUARY 6th?! GTFO OF HERE WITH THAT SHIT!!!!🏳️‍🌈🖤🤬🔥

Whoa, easy, love…Yeshua will make sure that Mr. Trump will never get back in the White House. I’m furious and scared too, dear. But we have to spread the word about dismantling Project 2025.

@iloveyoutoinfinity

That’s our goal!