Special Edition: Five Thoughts On The Hur Report
Wilmington, we have a problem
On Thursday, Robert Hur, the Republican special counsel Merrick Garland appointed to investigate how classified documents ended up in Joe Biden’s archives, issued his report. It clears Biden of criminal wrongdoing, but on the gratuitous and frankly revolting partisan grounds that even if Biden weren’t president, he’s simply too old and doddering to be convicted by a jury for willfully retaining classified information. The firestorm is still building among:
The Republicans who say (in bad faith) that, set against the prosecution of Donald Trump for stealing and concealing classified information, this proves there’s a double standard in the justice system;
The overlapping group of Republicans who say (also in bad faith) that this proves Biden is mentally unfit for the presidency; and
The national press corps, whose reporters have been salivating for any issue that will help them establish a false equivalence between Biden and Trump.
More on all of this in the coming days and weeks, I’m sure, but for now I wanted to sketch out a few thoughts.
Of all the leading Democrats and liberals who are ill suited to protect the country from dictatorship, Merrick Garland stands out as the worst. Between Supreme Court oral arguments over Trump’s qualification for office and the Hur report, today served as a reminder of Garland’s dithering in pursuit of top-level insurrectionists; his Hamlet-esque irresolution in determining who should investigate Trump, what he should be charged with, and where he should be tried; his blind-to-reality decision to hand what should have been an internal-affairs style review over sloppy document retention to a senior Trump Justice Department official; his negligent decision to leave the partisan attack lines about Biden’s age in the final report. I hope he searches his soul at length over these decisions, but I suspect he lacks the self awareness and/or has too much self-regard.