Opinion The Biden special counsel's egregious abuse of power - Marcus, WaPo
President Biden’s handling of classified documents was appallingly sloppy, but special counsel Robert K. Hur made the right choice in concluding that criminal charges are not warranted and in distinguishing Biden’s treatment of classified material from that of former president Donald Trump. The same cannot be said of Hur’s depiction of what he presented as Biden’s enfeebled cognitive condition, “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The report’s extensive discussions of that issue were not merely gratuitous — they constituted an egregious transgression of prosecutorial boundaries.
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Still, Hur correctly assessed that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” As the report observed, “Historically, after leaving office, many former presidents and vice presidents have knowingly taken home sensitive materials related to national security from their administrations without being charged with crimes.”
Of particular note, Ronald Reagan “left the White House in 1989 with eight years’ worth of handwritten diaries, which he appears to have kept at his California home even though they contained Top Secret information.” Equally important, as Hur noted, Biden’s conduct was far less egregious than what Trump is charged with in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. As much as Trump and his allies will try to conflate the two situations and claim that Trump is being unfairly prosecuted, the evidence in the two cases is very different.
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And yet, that report provision also led Hur astray, with his extensive and unnecessary discussion about Biden’s mental capacity. The report notes that Biden’s memory of events was “significantly limited” and that he had “limited recollection and recall.” Fair enough; that’s arguably relevant to proving whether Biden intended to improperly retain classified information. If Hur had stopped there, fine. But he kept going. “In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse” than in his discussions with his ghostwriter in 2017, the report states.
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Prosecutors are supposed to remain above the partisan fray, not embroiled in it. Sometimes such spillover is inevitable. But a responsible prosecutor would have taken care to avoid what Hur has done, which is to let his report become a potent — perhaps even lethal — weapon in the coming campaign.
https://wapo.st/4bBjT9Q
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