Joe Biden’s political operation desperately wants you to believe that former special counsel Robert Hur let Joe Biden off the hook, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
In testimony before a congressional committee on Tuesday, Hur affirmed that he “did not exonerate” Biden — a claim that White House spokesman Ian Sams could not let stand. “The ultimate conclusion here was that charges are NOT warranted, and the case is CLOSED,” Sams wrote in a social-media post in which he helpfully included the dictionary definition of the word “exonerate.”
“In other words,” Sams concluded, “the President was cleared.” That’s neither what Hur said in his testimony nor what he concluded in the report Attorney General Merrick Garland released to the public.
The statement that caused the White House so much consternation was prompted by progressive representative Pramila Jayapal, who misrepresented the special counsel’s findings and invited correction. Via the Washington Examiner:
“So this lengthy, expensive, and independent investigation resulted in a complete exoneration,” Jayapal said, before diving into a question about specific statutes governing classified material.
Hur took issue with Jayapal’s comment, asserting that he did not clear Biden’s name of all wrongdoing in the manner she had suggested. “I need to go back and make sure that I take note of a word that you used, ‘exoneration.’ That is not a word that was used in the report, and that’s not part of my task as a prosecutor,” Hur said.
Jayapal interjected, “You exonerated him.” “I did not exonerate him,” Hur shot back. “That word does not appear in the report.”
Not only did Hur’s report fail to exculpate the president, it indicated that Biden’s mishandling of classified documents was willful and, therefore, prosecutable. It was only Hur’s discretionary judgment that a post-presidential prosecution of Biden would fail to secure a conviction that prevented the special counsel from recommending the Justice Department pursue charges.
While Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” Hur’s investigation could not establish the president’s “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” That’s a far cry from “exoneration,” but that was not all that convinced Hur that pursuing Biden in the courts would be a fruitless endeavor. “Prosecution of Mr. Biden is also unwarranted based on our consideration of the aggravating and mitigating factors,” Hur’s report read. One of the factors that stayed Hur’s hand is the president’s obvious decrepitude, which could lead a jury to sympathetically conclude that Biden was merely a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
No competent political operation would lean into the notion that their campaign’s principal was spared from criminal prosecution only because it’s unlikely that a jury would convict. They are obliged to spin their unenviable circumstances for the benefit of low-information voters who may not be aware of the facts of the case. But what Sams is engaged in isn’t mere spin. He’s not selectively curating facts to create a dubious impression in voters’ minds. He’s issuing claims that are outright false and easily refuted. There’s another word for that sort of behavior, one that Sams shouldn’t need a dictionary to understand.