Elections, Jamie O, Political Crack

Comey II, The Sequel

Robert Hur

There are exceptions, but sequels generally suck more than the original film. Especially if the original really sucked to begin with.

I am referring to yesterday’s Hur Report, which found that Biden would not be charged with any crimes over his handling of classified documents left in his garage, which based on the photos made me feel better about how disorganized my shed is. The old box next to a collapsed dog crate and other stuff in his garage? Biden couldn’t relate more to the American people if he ate a Whopper on the White House lawn while watching football.

All well and good, we can move on now. Welp…not quite. Very Special Prosecutor Robert “HURR HURR” Hur was not satisfied and being a Republican had to take some deep shots at what may be Biden’s greatest political weakness, his age. Hur claimed that Biden was foggy about the years of his vice presidency, foggy about key debates he had in the Obama White House, and perhaps most incredibly, said that Biden’s foggy memory is one reason he opposed criminal charges. He even stooped low to say that Biden couldn’t remember the exact date of his son’s death.

If you are getting deja vu all over again, to quote the Philosopher Yogi Berra, that would not be surprising. This, as NBC Go-To Lawyer Brain Andrew Weissmann put it, was a concerning “repetition of James Comey.” In July 2016, Comey issued a statement that while Hillary Clinton was not going to be charged, she was super-duper careless and terrible about her email server. So, the media focused on nothing else.

The good news is that this is February and not July, so the Biden team has plenty of time to counter this. Plus the American people in general have the memory of a goldfish, so this probably will be forgotten at some point. Hard to say if it will create some background concern about Biden’s age. I guess as long as Hur does not do something like sit down for a 60 Minutes interview in late October to parallel the infamous Comey Letter of late October 2016, then we probably should be okay.

That leads me to this:

There is an alarming level of naivete that infects those in organizational leadership which is basically “people who would be at a dinner party with me cannot ever do anything bad.” Hur headed the Stanford Law Review and clerked for a Supreme Court Justice (Rehnquist, who in my opinion was a pioneer in dropping ideological right-wing bullshit into the modern justice system).

As always when a Democrat appoints a Republican to investigate a Democrat, there is high-minded language about how amazingly unbiased that person will be. Disappointing Attorney General Merrick Garland offered the following on Hur:

“I am confident that Mr. Hur will carry out his responsibility in an even-handed and urgent manner, and in accordance with the highest traditions of this Department. Thank you all.”

Narrator: This did not happen.

Hur’s editorializing in the report, which seems to be ready-made for Fox News to parrot, was a violation of, let’s see…THE FUCKING DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE ITSELF.

I turn to Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo for more, as he makes this very point. One might think that after seeing Ken Starr’s sanctimonious preening for the cameras during the Monica Lewinsky investigation Democrats might have second thoughts about appointing partisan Republicans to run investigations of their own. But no, they do not seem to see it. Once again, after lecturing the people (read: lefties who would not be invited to a Georgetown dinner party) that they simply do not understand how things work these people demonstrate that they simply do not understand how things work. 

Once again, any high-minded “look at how much integrity we have, we are appointing a Republican” gets flushed the moment a report like this comes out. No one remembers that, there is little attention paid to the fact that there will be no charges brought, and all the focus is on what the Republican leading the investigation editorialized about. Even if that Republican demonstrates poor judicial ethics and is more or less the opposite of the even-handed and “in accordance with the highest traditions of this Department.”

All this said it is not the end of the world for Biden. Hopefully, Biden’s campaign people learned from the email flack how to counter this. Biden does very well with interviews, so his campaign should get him out there and soon. Not just interviews, but Biden should appear more in other venues as well. Last year, there were plenty of rumblings in the media that Biden was old and feeble-minded, and he killed it at the State of the Union. That is happening this year on March 7. Biden definitely could use another performance like that.

We certainly are not getting much in the way of help in defeating fascism from Democrat-appointed Republican special investigators.

The last word goes to Ani DiFranco, with a song about short memories.

 

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