He cooperated with authorities, he was the one who contacted them when he discovered them. There was no attempt at a coverup or hiding anything. They were given back when asked. That’s why he’s not charged,l.
Trump was not charged for simply having documents he shouldn’t. He was charged because he wouldn’t return them. He moved them when investigators arrived. He had a lawyer falsely claim that all documents were returned when they weren’t. He conspired to conceal them, even had footage on his security tapes destroyed. Not a single charge involves simple possession of the documents, but rather keeping them, hiding them, covering it all up.
For an easier analogy, let’s say two people each checked out a library book and let the book they borrowed become overdue.
Let’s say Joey was cleaning his room, saw that he had a book that he forgot about, took it to the library, and turned it in with an apology. They charge him a small overdue fee and that’s it.
But Don doesn’t do that. The library contacts him and he says he turned it in. He doesn’t know what they’re talking about. He’s then caught with the book, which he insists is his, ignore the stamp on it with the library logo, he doodled that as a joke. The library would treat him differently and might ban him from ever checking out another book.
The library didn’t take pity on Joe for being dumb. He cooperated and make it clear that it was a mistake, one he voluntarily tried to fix. He’s trustworthy. Don is not someone the library can trust and they rip up his card.
The exact quote is that “he 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,.” So, while Sam may have paraphrased a bit, I don’t think that is the worst of what he did. Rather, he has taken one statement and claimed it to be the full argument in Biden’s defense whereas I think it was pretty much the weakest argument in Biden’s defense that was given in the report.
We also believe some of the same evidence that supports reasonable doubt for
the classified Afghanistan documents also supports reasonable doubt for the
notebooks, including Mr. Biden’s cooperation with the investigation, his diminished
faculties in advancing age, and his sympathetic demeanor. These factors likely
make it difficult for jurors to conclude he had criminal intent.
The third isn’t even a defense, really–just a statement that a jury is not likely to find criminal intent. And the sympathy is part-and-parcel with his age:
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. Based on our direct interactions with and
observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify
reasonable doubt.
So there’s really only two lines of argument here: cooperation with the authorities, and poor memory. Perhaps the latter is less important than the first, but it’s not like it’s some unimportant side-note.
Well, I don’t know exactly how you are doing the counting, but I think it is more than three; the report itself says there are “several defenses”. For people who want to read the relevant portion in detail, it is on pp. 4-6 in the executive summary (https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/af07e020c210293d/8dac19a5-full.pdf). I guess there may even be more in the body of the report but I haven’t waded that far into it.
I’m counting based on the summary I quoted. Each of those is broken down further, of course, but ultimately they are all questions of whether the mistakes were innocent or not. Being cooperative is one line of argument: that he was forthcoming and not trying to hide anything. Being forgetful is the other main line of argument.
The poor memory helps negate the willfull part of the crime. Like, a jury might believe he forgot he even had the documents - in that vein. He had been allowed classified docs in his house for 8 years as VP very recent to his comment and might not have even thought it a big deal. The classified stuff never really comes up again for the book.
There might be a sympathetic part to it as you suggest, but that’s not the main thrust of it.
Now, did they need a 388pg report to deal with an 8 word phrase when Biden said he just found all the classified stuff downstairs…probably overkill.
Why don’t you actually read the pages that I quoted to you rather than relying on a couple paragraphs you chose to quote as somehow the sum total of every possible argument presented in Biden’s defense?
You are also lumping things together: The discussion about forgetfulness admits that it would not be so unreasonable for him to forget. The part about him getting sympathy from a jury because he is an elderly man with a bad memory is not necessary for a lot of that.
I had already read the pages–that’s where I got my original quote from. Memory plays a key role in them:
For example, Mr. Biden could have found the classified Afghanistan documents at his Virginia home in 2017 and then forgotten about them soon after.
finding classified documents at home less than a month after leaving office could have been an unremarkable and forgettable event.
In addition. Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023.
Given Mr. Biden’s limited precision and recall during his interviews with his ghostwriter and with our office
And then the one already quoted:
elderly man with a poor memory
Those are all from pages 4-6. Of them, the first two don’t explicitly connote a diminished memory, but they play into the same line of argument. The diminishment just reinforces that line.
I agree that it’s not the whole thing. My main point is that it’s only an argument for why they don’t recommend prosecution–not for why the mistakes were innocent. So I really only count two lines of argument here.
I’m not claiming that poor memory is the only or even primary line of argument. But it can’t be dismissed as a strawman or a side-note, either. It comes up repeatedly.
It doesn’t have to be sympathy. They coulld be saying that he’s simply mentally unfit to stand trial, or woill be in a year or two. It could be that they don’t think he can be put on the stand because he’d just look like an old man with a poor memory, and none of his testimony could be tristed And he would look sympathetic to the jiry. They’d never convict an ex-president under that circumstance. I think that’s a correct call.
I haven’t read the whole document, but I don’t think they say anything about fitness to stand trial. It’s entirely about whether jurors can be convinced to convict. If not, then it’s not worth prosecution. The jurors are influenced both by evidence and by sympathy with the defendant.
They could be saying he’s a hamster… but they aren’t, nor are they saying any of the other things you are implying. He’s laying out how the defense would likely paint him, based atleast in part on some of his interviews.
I want to see some context for some of the quoted statements.
For example…
“if it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?”
“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”
Sounds like a rhetorical question he might have asked if he was accused of improperly accessing documents during the time frame when he was VP and therefore allowed access to them. I’d love to see the entire interview transcript, not just out of context snippets.
This was a hatchet job by a partisan prosecutor frustrated by the fact that ultimately there was no case. There were a number of ways to make the point. “Mr. Biden’s memory lapses would likely be seen as unremarkable and understandable by a jury.” Period. Seriously, after they concluded that a VP a month out of his term simply forgetting he had a box of stuff in his garage was unremarkable, why was there a need to go any further?
The fucking Mueller report wouldn’t go so far as to explicitly state Trump had committed a crime, torturing words to say it without saying it. This asshole couldn’t make his point without offering his inexpert opinion that Biden’s a doddering, senile old fart? And I agree with Ann’s point made earlier that it would be nice to understand the context of some of the “memory lapse” quotes, the whole stream of conversation. I don’t trust this SOB at all.
One of the putative IRS whistleblowers made a somewhat analogous claim about Special Counsel, David Weiss, during the interminable “Biden Crime Family” investigation:
The claim that Joe doesn’t know when his son died (as opposed to has an obvious strong emotional response to discussions about his son’s death such that he may not immediately spout specific dates) is a callous, personal, and entirely gratuitous political attack. It doesn’t at all belong in this kind of report. Joe is right to be upset. What bearing at all would his son’s tragic death have on this case? It’s really outrageous. It’d be like including that he farted during his interview, only this is much worse.
He waited to investigate Trump and his insurrection, without any reasonable explanation. Trump could have been tried and convicted of numerous crimes by now. Why did he appoint a Republican special prosecutor in this case? We’ve seen over and over Republicans can’t be trusted to conduct an unbiased investigation.