The Audacity: New York Times Says That Hur Tapes Reveal What "Many Suspected" But Which Democrats -- Just Democrats, Not Their Media Enablers -- Denied

Sure sure sure.

'Watch Me,' Biden Said. But Hearing Him in Hur Interview Is More Revealing. The former president's halting responses to questions by a special counsel show him exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be -- and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.

For much of his time in the White House, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. offered a quick rebuttal to those raising concerns about his age: "Watch me," he said.

Yet, in the end, it may be the sound of Mr. Biden's own voice that proves what his aides worked furiously, and spent hundreds of millions of campaign dollars, to try to keep the public from seeing with its own eyes.

The five-hour-and-10-minute audio recording of a special counsel's interview with Mr. Biden on Oct. 8 and 9, 2023, shows a president struggling to recall dates and details, whose thoughts seem jumbled as he tries to recreate events that had occurred just a few years earlier.

The information in the audio recording, which Axios published on Saturday, is not new. The 258-page transcript of the interview of Mr. Biden by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified documents, was released in March 2024. His report set off a political firestorm in the midst of the president's re-election campaign.

But the sound of Mr. Biden's fragile voice and unsteady responses offers a revelation of its own. The Hur tapes reveal the president exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be -- and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.

In the days after Mr. Hur released his report, Democrats fanned out across the news media to vouch for the president, assuring the public of their eyewitness vantage point on his deep knowledge and sure-handed command of the nation and the world.

He was "sharp" and at the "top of his game," they said almost in unison. He was "focused, impressive, formidable and effective," as Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, one of the youngest leading Democrats, put it memorably. Biden administration officials declined to release the audio recording of his interview, asserting executive privilege.

Just "Democrats," huh? No media figures joined the cover-up?

But behind the closed doors of the White House's map room, where Mr. Biden answered Mr. Hur's patient queries over the beat of a ticking grandfather clock, the former president offers responses that trail off midsentence and jumbled thoughts that appear unrelated to the question. There are pauses as he struggles for details and extended digressions on the moldings in his home, the importance of Gutenberg's printing press and the storage of his prized Corvette.

In the audio recording, Mr. Hur's conclusion -- that a jury would see Mr. Biden as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" -- is not merely valid, it is irrefutable.

"Well, if it was 2013 -- when did I stop being vice president?" Mr. Biden wonders in a weakened voice, when asked by Mr. Hur to identify papers stored in the home he rented after he left office in 2017. "They didn't get to Wilmington until 2022 or something, right? Or 20-whatever. I don't know."

For Democrats, the audio recording's release puts party leaders in the uncomfortable position of having to reconcile the man heard in Mr. Hur's interview with the forceful president they described in response to their voters' insistent questions.

For months after the election, Democrats hoped to avoid the questions of what they knew and when about Mr. Biden's fitness to serve a second term. Hearing the recording may further a kind of truth-and-reconciliation moment for a party that has only begun to let go of its denials.

It does not take much for Mr. Hur to uncover what Democrats had tried so hard to conceal.

At first, Mr. Biden sounds fairly capable. He describes the binders packed with classified and unclassified information that he read through during his eight years as vice president. And he discusses his goals after leaving that office in 2017, including his desire to remain involved with "consequential" foreign policy matters and cancer research.

Then, about an hour into the recording, Mr. Biden's answers take a sharp turn.
A simple question about the documents that were stored at the Naval Observatory elicits an 11-minute response. It begins with a young Mr. Biden winning an international tort competition in law school, winds through an early legal case involving a 23-year-old man who lost part of his penis in an oil-refinery accident and concludes with Mr. Biden winning a seat on the New Castle, Del., County Council in 1970.

Again and again, Mr. Biden answers the prosecutor not as someone under federal investigation but as an aging politician recounting his life story for posterity.

Like many people as they age, Mr. Biden remains himself. He cracks jokes about his wife looking hot in a bikini and about how he is still a "young man." He displays the flashes of ego and self-aggrandizement that have been staples of his political career, boasting about "fundamentally changing" the nation's strategic position in the Indo-Pacific. And he luxuriates in his own long-winded stories about his political influence, describing being handed an archer's bow by the leader of Mongolia and nonchalantly shooting a bull's-eye.

But now, the details elude him.

Mr. Biden's lawyers step in to supply the date when his son Beau died -- an event that devastated the former president and defined his final years in public life. They remind Mr. Biden of the year that he left the vice president's office and Donald J. Trump was first inaugurated as president.

The New York Times' Peter Baker immediately claimed, WITHOUT EVIDENCE, that Trump had leaked the tape to embarrass Biden. He's attempting the standard Democrat-Media trick of attempting to shift the story from the contents of the leak to propriety of the leak.

In fact, he even asserts that Axios should have refused to publish these extremely newsworthy recordings, on prinzibuhl or something.

Weird how they never do this with leaks against Republicans.

Now, while some even on the left are expressing justifiable outrage at the massive deception on someone's part, the media's involvement is hardly questioned at all in the media, despite the book out now from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson which at the very least suggests incuriosity or failure to notice things among American mainstream journalists during the time that American voters were definitely noticing them.

Baker, himself a White House correspondent mind you, never broke any news about Biden's age. He contributed to a wishy-washy article at the NYT last year covering some "they said, they said" over Biden's competence that ultimately left the reader with the conclusion that "sure, he's old, but also, not that [old] though."

He and Yale professor Natasha Sarin spoke with MSNBC's Alex Witt on Saturday, and briefly touched on the subject to equally underwhelming effect.

Witt introduced the subject not with a question about what Baker knew as a White House correspondent, or what he did or does believe about Biden's competence then or now. Instead, the MSNBC host opened by saying, with a full SMH tone of voice, "Why release the full audio now? I mean, it's after the fact. And do we know how Axios got the tapes?"

Baker, who, again, is a White House correspondent, offered implied criticism of Axios for the distasteful accepting of the audio tapes from the Trump administration, gave some verbal side-eye to Tapper and Thompson, and said the audio of an American president which not only exonerates Hur but gives a living voice to the ongoing process of exposing the cover-up -- of that significant piece of historic audio, Baker said it's only obvious purpose is to "embarrass" Biden.

He generously allowed a moment later that hearing the audio does have some limited value in that it helps to explain why Biden didn't have to face any charges as a result of Hur's investigation.

Jonathan Turley questions why Biden was allowed to commit multiple crimes with full Deep State Impunity.

"For posterity's sake." Those words from President Joe Biden sum up the crushing impact of the leaked audiotapes from the interview between then-President Joe Biden and Special Counsel Robert Hur. Not only did they remove any serious doubt over Biden committing the federal crimes charged against President Donald Trump, but they also constituted what is akin to a political racketeering indictment against much of the Washington establishment.

The interview from Oct. 8-9, 2023, has long been sought by Congress, but was kept under wraps by the government even as Biden campaigned for a second term.

Many of us balked at Hur's conclusion that no charges were appropriate despite the fact that the President removed classified material for decades, stored it in grossly negligent ways, and moved it around to unsecure locations, including his garage in Delaware.

Given President Donald Trump's indictment for the same offenses, it was hard to imagine how the Special Counsel could not recommend the same criminal charges (presumably after he left office).

Instead, Hur declared it would have been hard to get a jury to convict Biden because he was "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

It appears that Trump, on the other hand, was presumptively not sympathetic or well-meaning and possessed a good memory for prosecution.

The contrast was glaring and only reinforced the view of many citizens that there are two tracks for justice in Washington.

Soon after the report's release, President Biden gave an irate press conference in which he lied about the findings of his culpability and lashed out at any suggestion that he had gapped or stumbled in the interview.

For example, when reporters raised how Biden forgot when his son Beau died, Biden angrily responded, "How in the hell dare he raise that?" Frankly, when I was asked the question I thought to myself it wasn't any of their damn business."

However, it was not Hur but Biden himself who raised the death of his son, and he forgot a wide array of dates, including when he served in office.

Nevertheless, media outlets like the Atlantic followed the lead of the White House in attacking Hur for "misleading" the public on Biden's memory.

The interview shows that in 2023 it was clear that Biden was mentally diminished despite claims from many allies and former aides that there was a sudden loss of capacity just before the disastrous debate in 2024. It is now undeniable that the White House staff actively hid the president's incompetence from the American public. That includes questions over the assurances of White House press secretary Jen Psaki (who left her post in May 2022) and Karine Jean-Pierre who portrayed Biden as sharp and running circles around the staff.

Miranda Devine argues the real story here isn't that Biden was senile, which we all knew, but that he was blazingly guilty of having stolen classified documents and "stored" them in completely insecure places, and then playing the Confused Old Man to avoid answering questions about this.

Miranda Devine @mirandadevine

Here's the supposedly full audio of Special Counsel Robert Hur interviewing President Joe Biden.

The segment released last night was cherry-picked to reflect a narrative that supports the Hur/DOJ's convenient conclusion that Biden was guilty but unfit for trial due to his cognitive deficits.

The full audio, by contrast, shows Biden in full command of the facts when it suited him but growing wary and vague and filibustering when he perceived that the prosecutors were building a trap. And in case he didn't detect it, his lawyer Bob Bauer would interrupt to alert him. Merrick Garland and Robert Hur did not want to charge the sitting president, obviously, but they had too much incriminating evidence, such as classified material all over his home and office including from his days as senator, interviews his former aide Kathy Chung and a recorded conversation with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, in February 2017, in which Biden said that he had "just found all the classified stuff downstairs" in the basement of his Virginia home.
Hur's ingenious excuse leveraging Biden's cognitive issues got everyone off the hook.
There is much more to this story than the Biden-was-senile cover up. More importantly, Biden was corrupt -- and that is still being covered up.

Why? My guess is it's because the cover-up artists still work in the DOJ and they are now covering up their cover up under the noses of Trump's appointees.

Miranda Devine @mirandadevine

Seriously, has anyone listened to the whole Hur audio? The establishment takeout that this is just about Joe Biden having pudding for brains is lazy and misses the deeper point, which is that the prosecutors had him cold on possessing classified documents he had no right to keep.

Biden lies and dissembles and filibusters and goes vague and mumbly at all the crucial points, with the help of lawyer Bob Bauer, who interrupts every time Joe might incriminate himself and laughs like a hyena when Joe gets feisty or cracks a sarcastic joke at the prosecutors' expense.

It is vintage Biden, nasty, smarmy, and self aggrandizing. He tries to impress the lawyers in the room with exaggerated highlights of his subpar legal career. At one point he boasts about spending Thanksgiving in Nantucket handwriting a memo about Afghanistan to Obama to try to "save his ass". Delusions of grandeur.

You can hear the prosecutors' frustration - they're in a straitjacket and with a strict time limit. He reminds them out of the gate that he has just been on the phone to Bibi Netanyahu talking about the Oct. 7 attack - the previous day -- just so they know they are keeping him from more important business.

Bottom line is he absurdly lies throughout. He denies having kept classified material for his personal use. It is not something he would ever do because he's so upright and honorable.

And yet the prosecutors found reams of it tucked away everywhere in his house, garage, and Penn Center office, along with Biden's recorded admission to his ghostwriter that he had found classified material in his basement he could use for his memoir.

So they had a dilemma. Do they charge the sitting president and label him a pathological liar, causing a massive scandal and constitutional crisis? Or do they use his age and mental fog as an excuse not to charge him? Pretty clear which was the easier path.

I don't know if I buy this "he was just pretending" thing. Yes, he lied and was evasive, but he's clearly also senile. It's incredible that he's being asked about his theft of US top secret documents and instead brags, ludicrously, about impressing Mongolians with his incredible archery skill. He sounds like Kim Il-Jung bragging about shooting a 18 in a round of golf.

MAZE @mazemoore

I made the video they are questioning. They claim it's full of "deceptively edited clips". I just went back and checked every clip. Nothing was taken out of context. This was rich coming from CNN.

posted by Ace at 02:12 PM

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