Joe Biden is planning to make his attorney general Merrick Garland the scapegoat for the bombshell report which highlighted his mental challenges, it has been reported.
The Department of Justice released its long-awaited investigation into the president's mishandling of classified documents Thursday, delivering a damning assessment of his 'diminished faculties' and limited memory.
But Biden, 81, has informed his aides and advisers that Garland didn't do enough to rein in the report written by Special Counsel Robert Hur, according to Politico.
Top Biden aides have even suggested Garland should have edited the parts that made the president look like a senile old man - despite Biden vowing to hire an impartial attorney general in the wake of the Trump presidency.
Democrat insiders have also claimed more time working on makeup and lighting could help ease concerns about his age, according to CNN. They've urged aides to have him sat down at the start of appearances, rather than letting him shuffle onto stage stiffly - and to stop claiming the president merely suffers from arthritis.
It comes as the Biden-Harris campaign team released a statement on Friday hitting out at Donald Trump's comments that some onlookers claimed were panicked and showed just how badly the White House has reacted to the scandal.
Biden-Harris advisor TJ Ducklo -who resigned from a White House job in 2021 over a bullying scandal - bizarrely said: 'Every single time Donald Trump opens his mouth, he's confused, deranged, lying, or worse.'
'Tonight, he lied more than two dozen times, slurred his words, confused basic facts, and placated the gun lobby weeks after telling parents to 'get over it' after their kids were gunned down at school.
'But you won't hear about any of it if you watch cable news, read this weekend's papers, or watch the Sunday shows.
The special counsel report into Biden did not recommend bringing charges against him but it provided a cascade of damaging findings about files found in his garage as well as the president's fitness for office.
In interviews with investigators, Biden became muddled about the dates he was vice president and could not even remember the year in which his son Beau died.
Biden angrily lashed out at a press conference Thursday - but mixed up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico, galvanizing concerns he is unfit for the job.
The report said his cavalier attitude to classified documents, such as his habit of reading sensitive files to a ghostwriter, posed a significant national security risk.
One of the reasons they decided not to press charges was because '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.
Biden is said to be unimpressed at Attorney General Garland over the report, according to two sources close to the president, as it could threaten his presidential campaign.
The two advisors believe Hur went beyond his scope and was misleading in his descriptions.
But they take issue with Garland and say he should have demanded edits to the report.
Biden has not commented on Garland’s future but the belief is that the attorney general will not remain in his post for a possible second term, according to the sources.
'This has been building for a while,' one said. 'No one is happy.'
A former senior Justice Department official insisted that the frustrations at Garland are better directed at the White House.
Biden's team had the option to exert executive privilege over elements of Hur’s report but chose not to.
While Garland would have had to explain any redactions to Congress if he made edits to the report.
'The way in which the White House story kept changing at the outset made it much more difficult for the Justice Department to resist having a special counsel,' the source said.
'Had there been a very clear story at the beginning, it would have been easier.'
Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the liberal American Prospect, said: 'Garland is far and away Biden’s worst appointee by an order of magnitude.
'And we all pay the price. If Biden goes down the drain because Garland has mishandled the investigation of Trump and gave Republicans a weapon … then the country pays the price.
'It’s not just that Biden gets punished for the stupidity of appointing Garland.'
His 'diminished faculties in advancing age' would likely make him a sympathetic figure to jurors, the special counsel report says.
Biden found himself in the spotlight after his predecessor Donald Trump was charged with illegally keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home.
Special Counsel Hur spent a year investigating. His report will likely undermine the Biden campaign's attempts to use the charges against Trump in the 2024 election.
Instead, there is plentiful ammunition for Trump, with a series of revelations about Biden's mental sharpness.
It describes his failure to remember key dates in his career and his personal life when he was interviewed by investigators.
'He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended ("if it was 2013 - when did I stop being Vice President?"), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began ("in 2009, am I still Vice President?"),' he reportedly said.
'He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.'
He was also apparently hazy on the debate around withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, which was such a key part of the first months of his presidency.
'We also expect many jurors to be struck by the place where the Afghanistan documents were ultimately found in Mr. Biden's Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood,' the report concludes.
Photographs in the report include some of the classified Afghanistan documents, showing how they were apparently stored with other household items, including a ladder and a wicker basket.
The material included notebooks with handwritten entries 'implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods' taken from White House briefings.
The investigation said there was plenty of evidence to suggest that Biden was aware that he was not allowed to keep such classified notes after leaving office, pointing out that his long Washington career meant he was familiar 'with the measures taken to safeguard classified information and the need for those measures to prevent harm to national security.'
Even so, notebooks crammed with classified information were stored in unlocked drawers at his home.
And it was not simply the case that the notebooks were misplaced and forgotten.
'He consulted the notebooks liberally during hours of discussions with his ghostwriter and viewed them as highly private and valued possessions with which he was unwilling to part,' writes Hur.
The ghostwriter helped him with his 2017 memoir, titled 'Promise Me, Dad.'
Biden said he was pleased that no charges would be brought and declared the matter closed.
The Biden-Harris released a statement slamming Trump for his comments surrounding guns at an event on Friday.
DailyMail.com has contacted the White House and Department of Justice for comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment