While I was organizing my thoughts on the Trump v. Anderson oral arguments, there were meaningful developments in another legal matter involving a presumptive 2024 Presidential candidate – except this time the matter involves President Biden.
Some context to start:
So far, in this series of posts that I started a few weeks ago, I have yet to mention the “Mar-a-Lago documents case”. This is one of two federal criminal cases styled U.S. v. Trump, both brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith; the other is what I’ve been calling the “Jan 6th federal case”, the case in which this week the D.C Circuit denied Trump’s interlocutory appeal on presidential immunity. That case is being heard by a D.C.-based federal judge, Chutkan; the Mar-a-Lago version of U.S. v. Trump is being heard by a Florida-based federal judge, Cannon.
The meat of the case before Judge Cannon is that, allegedly (but with no apparent shortage of compelling evidence), after leaving the White House Trump not only brought dozens of boxes of government documents inclusive of highly classified material to his semi-public compound at Mar-a-Lago, but also obstructed justice when the government asked for those documents’ return.
While investigations into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents were underway, lesser numbers of classified documents were also found a little more than a year ago at the homes of the two most recent Vice-Presidents, Pence and Biden. Several weeks after Attorney General Garland had appointed Jack Smith as a Special Counsel to lead the Trump investigations, and shortly after the news broke of classified documents being found at Biden’s home, Garland appointed a second Special Counsel in January 2023 to lead the investigation of Biden’s handling of documents. That Special Counsel, Robert Hur, had been an appointee in the Trump DOJ.
Hur had sent his final report to Garland on Monday, but news of it didn’t break until today when Garland sent a letter accompanying that report to Congress. The report’s conclusion is that no federal charges are warranted.
However, one paragraph in the 350+ page report is kicking up a firestorm and attracted a two-page rebuttal from Biden’s counsel in an appendix to the report. In a subsection called “For other reasons, a jury will be unlikely to unanimously convict Mr. Biden” Hur writes:
“Mr. Biden will likely present himself to the jury, as he did during his interview with our office, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. While he is and must be accountable for his actions–he is, after all, the President of the United States–based on our direct observations of him, Mr. Biden is someone for whom many jurors will want to search for reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury they should convict him–by then a former president who will be at least well into his eighties–of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
This, of course, plays right into one of Trump’s major campaign themes, namely the purported cognitive impairment of the man he frequently calls “Sleepy Joe”.
Moving away from legal news for a brief moment: This week, a new poll of key swing state Wisconsin had Trump and Biden tied 49-49 in a head-to-head matchup, while having Haley ahead by an astonishing 57-42 in a head-to-head matchup. However, this week Haley couldn’t even win a primary on which Trump wasn’t on the ballot, losing 30-63 on Tuesday in Nevada to “None of the above”.