Every American Should Read Biden’s Interview by Special Counsel Hur
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
March 16, 2024 6:30 AM
Before the moment slips away, it’s important to highlight one of the most significant, hidden aspects of Tuesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing featuring testimony from former special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated President Biden’s willful illegal retention of classified documents: The Biden Justice Department withheld production of the transcript of President Biden’s five-hour interview by Hur until just before the hearing was scheduled to begin.
Now that we’ve seen the transcript, the reasons for the gamesmanship are obvious — as Dan McLaughlin’s excellent post from Tuesday illustrates.
On the one hand, the Justice Department realized that continuing to suppress the transcript would make Attorney General Garland and other Biden DOJ appointees too obviously complicit in the administration’s lies about Hur — in particular, Biden’s outrageous, theatrical claim that Hur had brought up Beau Biden’s death in order to play on the president’s emotions and trip him up. (Biden at the press conference: “How the hell dare he [Hur] raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damned business.”)
In reality, a realm increasingly remote from the president, it was Biden himself who brought up his son’s death. The transcript makes undeniable that Biden could not remember what year it happened. The relevant exchange involved Hur’s question about how Biden handled documents circa 2017–18. The president replied that “in this timeframe, my son is — either been deployed or is dying.” Amid stammering, Biden had to ask aides the year of his elder son Beau’s death — a tragic event that occurred in 2015, two years before the time about which Hur was inquiring. Beau Biden’s deployment was even less germane to Hur’s question: He was deployed in Iraq as an Army lawyer in the Judge Advocate General Corps for about nine months in 2009.
On the other hand, the transcript is such a disaster for the administration that the Justice Department knew it could not afford to give Committee Republicans time to read it thoroughly and incorporate it effectively into their questioning of Hur.
I’ll confine myself to one typical example, although many could be cited. On page 55 of the transcript, Hur asks Biden in what workspaces he kept documents at the vice president’s residence (the Naval Observatory); Biden’s response runs seven pages — although it was not a sensible response to the very simple question asked.
The president began by recounting that “I was the guy who wrote the Violence Against Women Act”; that agriculture is “a $4 billion industry in Delaware and the Delmarva peninsula”; that in a law-school torts class he was applauded for speaking ten minutes about a case he had not read; that “to make a long story short” he got a job out of law school at a firm in Delaware; and that “to make a long story not quite so long” he participated in a case while he was waiting for his bar results involving “this poor kid [who was] down a hundred-foot vessel, chimney, scraping the hydrogen bubbles off of the inside” but “was wearing the wrong pants, wrong jeans, and he —a spark caught fire and got caught in the containment vessel and he lost part of his p@nis and one of his testicles and he was 23 years old.” The senior partner told Biden to write a memo supporting a motion to dismiss the case, “and son of a bitch, it prevailed,” whereupon Biden thought “son of a bitch I’m in the wrong business, I’m not made for this.”
Thereupon, the senior partner invited him to go to the Wilmington Club, where “no blacks, Catholics are allowed — have been allowed to be members. The DuPont family name.” (Biden elsewhere in the seven pages repeatedly refers to the DuPont family, whom he describes as “Rockefeller Republicans” highly influential in Delaware.) Biden recalled being so taken aback by the Wilmington Club invitation that, in “the only time I ever lied that I can remember looking somebody in the eye,” he made up a story that his father was coming to visit that day. Then he immediately walked through “the basement on a public building and walked in with a guy named Frank and I said I want a job as a public defender.” This began “what got me — I had been involved in the civil-rights movement. That got me deeply involved in trying to reform the Democratic Party, which was a southern Democratic Party. We were a slave state by law.”
“And the whole point of telling you all this,” he continued, “is that I had a lot of material that I kept notes on” about the Democratic Party. And at that point, when he was 26 or 27 years old, Biden elaborated, “I went to work part time for a criminal-defense firm mainly, a real estate — there were five people. And so I was no longer a public defender. . . .” Then “one thing led to another” and Biden joined a group seeking to reform the Democratic Party. Even though he was young, they wanted him to run for the state senate. But he wanted to start his own law firm instead. “So to make a long story short,” he ended up running for county council, but “wanted to be sure that I was going to lose,” so he ran in a district that no Democrat had ever won. “And I won it. And next thing you know, I’m in a tough position. My generic point was that there was a lot of material that I had amassed that I wanted to save. I probably still have it somewhere. And so that stuff would travel wherever the hell I was.”
At that point, mercifully, Hur interjected, “trying to steer us back to the end of your vice presidency.”
To repeat, what I’ve outlined above comes from a single, uninterrupted, utterly non-responsive answer to a question about where Biden kept documents while living in the Naval Observatory circa 2016.
It is of course true that Biden has always had a penchant for straying far afield from the question or matter at hand, dilating on one tangent after another; we’ve seen it for a half-century. But the difference in today’s 81-year-old Biden is stark: Events in his telling are conflated and collapse into nonsense; he lapses into incoherence and often cannot recall and relate basic information.
Biden is asking Americans to elect him president for another four-year term, at the end of which he will be 86 and four years older than the senescent man who answered special counsel Hur’s questions in October.
So please, read the transcript, but not for what it says about Biden’s carelessness regarding the nation’s secrets. Instead, read it and ask yourself whether he should be president right now, let alone for the next five years.