OPINION:
Democrats are scrambling in the wake of Thursday’s special counsel report. Attorney General Merrick Garland reluctantly appointed the independent investigator who produced the 388-page memo after a trove of classified documents were found casually stuffed into boxes near President Biden’s Corvette in his Delaware garage.
Many of our nation’s chief executives have retained secret letters as mementos of their service in the Oval Office, and it has never presented a problem. At least it didn’t until Mr. Biden’s Justice Department decided to convert common practice into criminal offense — but only as applied to former President Donald Trump.
Special counsel Robert Hur, the former U.S. attorney for Maryland, attempted to thread this legal needle last week by condemning then-citizen Joe Biden’s casual disregard for national security while declining to prosecute him for doing what Mr. Trump did, but worse.
As Mr. Hur documents, Mr. Biden took copious notes on classified subjects covered in the presidential daily brief and National Security Council meetings with the intent of preserving his legacy in memoirs. Many of the notes had to do with the situation in Afghanistan, something Mr. Biden candidly discussed in conversations with Mark Zwonitzer, who ghost-wrote Mr. Biden’s books.
In Mr. Biden’s garage, alongside a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape and potting soil, a tattered cardboard box had papers sticking out marked at the highly classified “Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information” level. Unlike the special counsel investigating Mr. Biden’s political opponent, Mr. Hur afforded the sitting president the benefit of every doubt, grasping for every possible innocent explanation for the felonious conduct.
Some of the conduct was blatant. Mr. Hur says the ghostwriter erased audio recordings upon learning there was an investigation. As when Hillary Clinton smashed her hard drives and Robert Mueller’s Russiagate prosecution team wiped cellphones to cover their tracks, this was not deemed obstruction of justice.
FBI technicians were able to recover most — but not all — of the deleted audio files. In one, Mr. Biden warned the ghostwriter: “Some of this may be classified, so be careful … I’m not sure. It isn’t marked classified, but …”
This is problematic, as it’s one thing to hang on to such material, and it’s another to pass the material to someone without a security clearance, like Mr. Zwonitzer.
Mr. Hur cites the president’s “diminished faculties in advancing age, and his sympathetic demeanor” as reasons a jury would not convict him of this crime, a benefit another special counsel did not afford to Mr. Trump.
The president wants to have it both ways. In an angry response to the report, Mr. Biden insisted he’s mentally fit. “I’m ‘well-meaning’ and I’m ‘an elderly man’ and I know what the hell I’m doing,” he thundered.
Yet the memory lapses are reportedly preserved in the surviving tapes of Mr. Biden’s ghostwriter chats and special counsel interview. Voters ought to hear these recordings and judge for themselves. If the president truly does know what he’s doing, he deserves to be treated no differently than his political opponent.
On the other hand, if he’s not fit to be tried, then he’s not fit to be president of the United States. As long as there are two standards of prosecution based on the political affiliation of the accused, there is no justice.
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