One of the big takeaways from the newly released transcript of President Joe Biden's two-day interview with Robert Hur is that the special counsel was exceedingly generous when describing the president as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
Much of the conversation with Hur is littered with barely incoherent answers and spiraling word salads. Though, the reader is occasionally entertained by Biden's blowhard-y non sequiturs. We learn about Biden's Corvette -- twice. We learn that the president is a frustrated architect but an excellent archer. Biden even jokes that there might be risque pictures of First Lady Dr. Jill Biden.
Then again, the fact that the entire two-day interview isn't a giant nonsensical rant is not as impressive as his defenders might believe. The president is, indeed, completely coherent at times. And those are the times he's probably lying.
When Hur released his report last month, for example, it noted that Biden couldn't recall the year his son died. This is not the kind of event that typically slips a healthy person's mind -- not even one who is constantly trying to emotionally manipulate the public with misleading claims about the cause of his son's death.
Recall that Biden feigned great anger about this interaction. "There's even a reference that I don't remember when my son died," he barked at reporters when the report was released. "How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself: It wasn't any of their damn business."
The transcript shows that it was Biden who brought up his late son Beau, not Hur. The president claimed he believed Beau had died in 2017 or 2018 when he had tragically died of brain cancer in 2015.
Who knows? Maybe Biden forgot what he said? Reading the full context of his answer, and considering the president's lifelong fabulism, it is not entirely out of the question that the president purposely floated the wrong date to try and justify his pilfering of classified documents. Either way, it's bad.
More importantly, Biden also contradicted himself when speaking about the documents themselves.
When Hur asked the president about the classified papers in his possession, the president contended that he "had no purpose for them, and I think it would be inappropriate for me to keep clearly classified documents." But Hur, in his prepared testimony for Congress, says: "We also identified other recorded conversations during which Mr. Biden read classified information aloud to his ghostwriter."
So, the documents did have a very specific purpose. Those files were used, according to Amtrak Joe, to help earn $8 million writing a book after leaving the Obama administration.
Yet, when the Hur report was released, the left wing did what they always do when confronted with bad news: They feigned a meltdown. They smeared the messenger. They concoct conspiracy theories. They denied reality. They're doing the same right now.
The media continues to frame Hur's findings as an exoneration of Biden to head off the (correct) perception that there is a stark, selective prosecution when it comes to the hoarding of classified documents. Donald Trump, yes. Biden and Hillary Clinton, no.
In The New York Times, Charlie Savage begins the paper's story on the leaked transcripts by misleading readers with the contention that Hur had found "insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Biden." This is not true. Hur's report concluded that Biden came off as too feeble-minded to be convicted by a jury for his decades-long mishandling of classified information. According to the special counsel, the president had "willfully retained classified information." And he had done it for years before winning the presidency.
During today's hearing, Democrats falsely used the word "exoneration" several times. Hur noted that the word "does not appear anywhere in my report, and that is not my conclusion."
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books -- the most recent, "Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent."
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