Top Republicans hammered President Joe Biden on Thursday after special counsel Robert Hur released his long awaited report on the findings from his criminal investigation into Biden’s handling of classified material.
The report said that even though Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” prosecutors concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.”
There were a variety of reasons why prosecutors declined to prosecute Biden, but arguably the top reason was Biden’s mental fitness, or lack thereof.
“Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017 [with whom he shared classified materials], and in his interview with our office in 2023,” the report said in its executive summary. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Prosecutors said that based on the way that Biden presents, jurors will “want to identify reasonable doubt” and that it would be “difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
The report sparked strong reactions from Republicans, many of whom called on him to resign, saying that he was not fit for office.
“THIS HAS NOW PROVEN TO BE A TWO-TIERED SYSTEM OF JUSTICE AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL SELECTIVE PROSECUTION!” said former President Donald Trump. “The Biden Documents Case is 100 times different and more severe than mine. I did nothing wrong, and I cooperated far more.”
“What Biden did is outrageously criminal – He had 50 years of documents, 50 times more than I had, and ‘WILLFULLY RETAINED’ them,” Trump continued. “I was covered by the Presidential Records Act, Secret Service was always around, and GSA delivered the documents. Deranged Jack Smith should drop this Case immediately. ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) released a joint statement with House Majority Leader Tom Emmer (R-MN), House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), and Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY).
“The Special Counsel’s finding that President Biden ‘willfully retained and disclosed classified materials’ and engaged in practices that ‘present serious risks to national security’ is deeply disturbing,” the statement said. “Not only does it demonstrate the President’s recklessness, but exposes a two-tiered system of justice that is indicting one President with politically motivated charges while carrying water for another amid similar allegations.”
“Among the most disturbing parts of this report is the Special Counsel’s justification for not recommending charges: namely that the President’s memory had such ‘significant limitations’ that he could not convince a jury that the President held a ‘mental state of willfulness’ that a serious felony requires,” the statement continued. “A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.”
Biden subsequently held an impromptu press conference where he exploded at the media for asking him about his mental health, declared he was the most qualified person in America to be president, and made multiple mental mistakes — including confusing world leaders and forgetting details about a variety of issues.
Numerous other top Republicans in Washington, D.C., weighed in on the report and Biden’s disastrous press conference, including:
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