Attorney General Merrick Garland was confronted by a reporter over whether it was “appropriate” to allow special counsel Robert Hur to accurately depict President Joe Biden as a bumbling old man with poor memory.
Biden and his supporters hit the roof when Hur publicly released the results of his probe into the octogenarian Democrat’s mishandling of classified documents, and while he wasn’t charged as former President Donald J. Trump was for essentially the same thing, he was deemed too senile to put before a jury.
In the special counsel’s words, Biden is a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” a description that infuriated the president and his surrogates, with reports that he and aides were fuming that Garland didn’t demand edits to the report.
On Thursday, the nation’s top law enforcement official found out that some are still pretty sore about Hur’s report which only solidified public perception about Biden’s advanced age and deteriorating cognitive capabilities.
BREAKING IN WASHINGTON: Attorney General Merrick Garland Says He’s Not A Lawyer For President Biden, but A Lawyer For the American People, He’s Been Ethical, Labels Idea of Editing Special Counsel’s Biden Docs Report as ‘Absurd.’ WATCH pic.twitter.com/cJ7truhGKD
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) March 21, 2024
Garland was taking questions at a news conference about the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against cellphone and computer manufacturer Apple when he was put on the spot with an unrelated question on why he allowed Hur to negatively portray Biden.
“On the special Counsel Robert Hur’s report. You personally have come in for a lot of criticism, in particular from the White House, anonymous officials who say that you should have acted to keep him from characterizing the president’s memory the way he did in that report, that you should have stepped in,” the reporter asked. “What’s your response to that?”
“I haven’t, no one from the White House has said that to me,” the attorney general responded, defending himself. “When the president announced my nomination, he said, to me directly and then to the American public that he intended to restore the independence and the integrity of the Justice Department. And that he wanted me to serve as the lawyer for the American people, not the lawyer for the president.”
“I sincerely believe that that’s what he intended then, and I sincerely believe that that’s what he intends now,” Garland added.
His answer wasn’t good enough for the reporter who was clearly on Biden’s side and turned up the heat with a follow-up. “But did you think that that was appropriate, the language that he used to characterize the president’s mental state?”
A visibly miffed Garland answered, “Look, they, I said from the very beginning that I would make public the report of the special… of all the special counsel appointed during a period of my service. That is consistent with the regulation, which requires a special counsel to explain what the special counsel’s decisions are. It’s consistent with the precedents. The full disclosure of all special counsel reports in the entire 25 years in which the regulation has been in effect.”
“It’s consistent with the common practice during the previous period of the independent counsel statute,” the DOJ boss said. “The idea that an attorney general would edit or redact or censor the special counsel’s explanation for why the special counsel reached the decision that special counsel did? That’s absurd.”
Garland’s reluctance to reign in Hur has caused problems for him in the White House, according to a Politico report from last month after the devastating portrayal of the 81-year-old Biden in the report.
Citing “two people close to the president,” the outlet claimed that Biden “has told aides and outside advisers that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not do enough to rein in a special counsel report stating that the president had diminished mental faculties.”
“Biden and his closest advisers believe Hur went well beyond his purview and was gratuitous and misleading in his descriptions, according to those two people, who were granted anonymity to speak freely,” Politico reported. “And they put part of the blame on Garland, who they say should have demanded edits to Hur’s report, including around the descriptions of Biden’s faltering memory.”
“This has been building for a while,” said one of the unnamed individuals. “No one is happy,” with the anonymous sources expressing the opinion that “most of the president’s senior advisers do not believe that the attorney general would remain in his post for a possible second term.”
If Biden manages to quell voter concerns about his age and ability, it probably isn’t likely that Garland will be around for much longer. But his replacement could be even worse.
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Author: Chris Donaldson
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