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lawfaremedia.org
by Quinta Jurecic, Tuesday, March 12, 2024
The Lawfare Institute in Cooperation With Brookings

The Whitewashed “Hur Report” WRT Biden’s diminishing mental faculties
The well-rehearsed Biden’s convincing act for the gullible Hur kept Biden out of jail

Special Counsel Robert Hur is coming in for scrutiny from the press over his characterizations of President Biden’s memory. The special counsel’s report on Biden’s handling of classified information, characterized “significant limitations” in Biden’s memory during the president’s interview with Hur’s office.

Those limitations, in Hur’s view, justified a decision to decline to prosecute the president, despite Hur’s unflattering depiction of the volume of classified information discovered at his Delaware home and at the Penn Biden Center, and Biden’s mishandling of it.

Biden, Hur reasoned in his report, could be successful in presenting himself to a jury as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

But today, March 12, the full transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden was made public in advance of the special counsel’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.

And as reporters noted, the Biden of the transcript looks quite different from the forgetful Biden described in the report.

“Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be,” wrote the Washington Post. Both the Post and the Wall Street Journal described the transcript as “more nuanced” than the report itself in terms of what it showed about Biden’s memory.

Yet there’s an irony to the media’s criticisms of Hur in light of the transcript. Overstated though his report might have been, Hur’s interest in Biden’s age was no match for that of the mainstream press itself.

Consider how the Times and the Washington Post covered the original report. “Special Counsel’s Report Puts Biden’s Age and Memory in the Spotlight,” blared the headline of a New York Times article, which described the Hur report as a “political disaster.”

The Washington Post characterized the mood among Democrats as “hair on fire.” By one tally, the Times and the Post each published over 30 stories about Biden’s age and memory in the days following the release of Hur’s report.

“IS BIDEN’S AGE NOW A BIGGER PROBLEM THAN TRUMP’S INDICTMENTS?” asked a CNN chyron two days after the release of Hur’s report.

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