Miranda Devine argued over the weekend on X that President Biden was senile like a fox in the interviews conducted in the Special Counsel documents investigation. She turned her argument into the column “‘Crazy like a fox’ Biden shows selective memory in belatedly released special counsel interview.” Her argument is that the Special Counsel used Biden’s age and mental fog as an excuse not to charge him in the case. The gist of the argument is that Hur and his team suffered a failure of nerve — that they chickened out.
Hur’s report is posted online here. Transcripts of Biden’s interview with Special Counsel are posted here (October 8) and here (October 9). The Hur investigation is back in the news because of the release of audio recordings of the interviews over the weekend. Audio of the full five hours are captured in the video below.
I named Robert Hur my man of the year on Power Line this past December. I wrote: “Hur suffered the slings and arrows of President Biden and Biden’s team on the White House payroll as well as the depredations of the Democrats’ voluntary public relations arm in our garbage media. To say the least, events have nevertheless vindicated Hur to a fare-thee-well.”
In the Special Counsel report, Hur sets forth the reasons supporting non-prosecution. As Devine suggests, he had Biden dead to rights. However, he came to the judgment that he would be unlikely to convict Biden of the relevant offenses. See the report’s executive summary for a brief statement of the rationale underlying his judgment. Devine’s column necessarily disparages Hur’s character and judgment without bothering to engage Hur’s argument.
Hur’s team included the Trump-appointed former United States Attorney Marc Krickbaum. Covering the Feeding Our Future fraud trial, I learned that it also included Minnesota’s own Assistant United States Attorney Joe Thompson. When I mentioned to former Minnesota United States Attorney Andrew Luger how highly I thought of Joe, he told me about Joe’s recruitment to work on Hur’s team. Thompson is head of the office’s Fraud and Public Corruption Section. He commuted from Minnesota to Washington during the year he worked on Hur’s team. The team also included other attorneys, but none that I have been able to identify.
In the ipse dixit spirit that Devine draws on in her conclusion, I say Devine makes a serious mistake. She misunderstands a fundamental quality of serious prosecutors. They want to charge high-profile defendants. They want to prosecute high-profile cases. Hur’s team would have been thrilled to prosecute Biden. It would have been a historical event.
Devine asserts that they wanted to give him a pass. In fact, as Devine herself observes, they “caught him red-handed.” The report did Biden no favors. It did not serve his interests. Saying that they had evidence of Biden’s wrongdoing without the certainty of conviction did not represent the easy way out. It was certain to upset just about everyone (as it did me at the time).
Both the transcripts and the recordings comport with the reality that Biden is not all there. At one point Biden comments on Dr. Jill: “I just hope you didn’t find any risque pictures of my wife in a bathing suit. Which you probably did. She’s beautiful.” At another point he gives a meandering description of Mongolia. He sounds like an elderly nursing home resident regaling his companions over iced tea.
Hur’s report suggests the horror of Biden’s condition while he was in office. The Democrat/Media axis accordingly leapt to Biden’s defense. Do you think the Hur team didn’t anticipate the leap? They aren’t fools.
I can say based on my own observations that Devine’s column wrongly disparages the character of Joe Thompson. I don’t know Hur or Krickbaum, but she disparages them as well without their ability to speak up on their own behalf. They have to let their work speak for itself. To repeat, I think Devine relies on their work without engaging their argument.
