The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Biden Broke the Law
Noting NBC’s sleazy handling of the story about Special Counsel Robert Hur’s devastating report about Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified information, Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey has thoughts.
“Robert Hur actually had a case against Joe Biden for felony violations of 18 USC 793,” Morrissey says NBC reports. He quotes a section from NBC’s story pertaining to that ghostwriter Biden allowed to access some of the documents.
Some of those documents go back to Biden’s time in the Senate. And those weren’t just found at Penn’s Biden Center either, but in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington home. …
Why is this important? Senators and House members have no individual custodial authority over classified materials. To access classified material, they have to use an authorized secure facility and must leave the material in place. Presidents, vice presidents, and executive-branch officials do have individual custodial authority, but also cannot remove material from designated authorized secure facilities to keep them in non-secure areas. (This is why Donald Trump got charged, along with his refusal to cooperate in returning the material.) But a Senator had no authority to move them at all in the first place.
There is little doubt that Biden violated the law, and to the idea of that being a surprise, there hasn’t been any doubt about that since investigators started hauling boxes of these documents from Biden’s garage. The primary issue Hur raised was whether prosecutors could get a jury to convict Biden beyond a reasonable doubt based on a “willfulness” standard, as Hur outlines in the executive summary. This is the key distinction between Biden and Trump on this point; Biden cooperated with investigators while Trump not only balked but then allegedly obstructed a grand-jury subpoena to retain the documents. That goes a very long way to proving “willfulness” to a jury about the retention of classified material.
He concludes:
But even that only goes so far. Under 18 USC 793, willfulness is an element of the crime, but there’s certainly evidence of it here as well. Biden ‘discovered’ classified material at his house in 2017, when he was out of office and not at all authorized to retain it. He commented about it to his biographer and then provided him access to the material, as Hur details in his report, even though the biographer was not cleared to access it. The failure at that point to notify the proper authority and transfer the material back is evidence of willful and unlawful retention. Hur downplays that in the report, but not in terms of its evidentiary value but because he believes that Biden’s cognition was impaired at that time too — or at least the defense would be able to argue it well enough to provide reasonable doubt to a jury.
That Biden was cognitively disabled enough in 2017 to avoid prosecution for a crime doesn’t exactly speak well for his fitness to serve another presidential term until 2029.