To watch yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee proceedings, during which Special Counsel Robert Hur took five hours’ worth of slings and arrows from both the Left and the Right, one gets the sense that he probably got things about right.

Yes, he should’ve brought charges against Joe Biden, whom he showed to be in clear violation of 18 U.S. Code Section 1924 regarding the handling of classified materials. But no, a jury of Biden’s peers in the rigged town of Washington, DC, would never, not in a million years, have convicted him.

The materials at issue included marked classified documents in his unsecured Delaware home dating back to his time as a U.S. senator. And Biden’s lawlessness was especially apparent when he knowingly shared these classified materials with a ghostwriter, whom he’d enlisted as part of an $8 million book deal.

Perhaps the highlight of the proceedings came during questioning from Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, who asked Hur the following question: “Joe Biden said, ‘I guarantee I did not share classified information.’ That’s not true, is it?”

To which Hur responded, “That is inconsistent with the findings based on the evidence in my report.”

“Because it’s a lie,” replied Gaetz. “That’s just what regular people would say, right?”

Hur couldn’t help but smile.

BREAKING: Special Counsel Robert Hur ADMITS Joe Biden LIED when Biden said he did not share classified information

GAETZ: “Joe Biden said, ‘I guarantee I did not share classified information.’ That’s not true, is it?”

HUR: “That is inconsistent with the findings.” pic.twitter.com/NyKPjHsozE

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) March 12, 2024

The Hur report also indicated that Biden’s answers as to why he mishandled these classified materials were deeply unsatisfactory at best and outright false at worst. That attempt to obfuscate is itself a chargeable offense. A good case could even be made that Joe Biden should be charged with having violated the Espionage Act — but, again, not in this lifetime.

Hur, as National Review’s Dan McLaughlin points out, is a registered Republican “who has steered clear of partisan politics during a two-decade career as a prosecutor, [and] was chosen, in part, because of his reputation for calmly handling the pressure of high-wire investigations and internal department politics.”

Again, when you’re taking fire from both sides, you’re probably getting things about right. But the Democrats’ heightened level of acrimony made clear that they have more at stake here.

Biden and his fellow Democrats were incensed by the release last month of Hur’s report and his assessment of the commander-in-chief “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Such a brutally accurate assessment, they believe, was “gratuitous” and could ultimately convince a majority of voters that Joe Biden has no business being anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue right now, much less beyond January 20, when his first term will come mercifully to an end.

In their heart of hearts, the Democrats know they’re defending the indefensible. They know that 90% of the American people believe their guy to be unfit to serve another four years. And yet. Hur declined to prosecute Biden largely because of his enfeebled state, but he’s somehow still qualified to make world-important decisions about war and peace, life and death?

The Leftmedia, led by pathetic water carriers like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, did their rotten best to cover up the president’s failing cognitive state in the wake of Hur’s damning report. “He’s better than he’s ever been — intellectually, um, analytically, because he’s been around for 50 years,” said Scarborough. “This version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever.”

Those words should be tattooed on Scarborough’s forehead and, when the time comes, chiseled onto his tombstone. The best Biden ever? Dude. Anyone who wishes to put the lie to that utterance need only look at footage of Joe Biden from a decade ago.

Thanks to Hur’s comments yesterday and the newly released transcript of his interview with Biden, the undeniable truth about Biden’s cognitive condition is now available for all to consider. What we don’t have yet, however, is the audio version of the transcript, which some House Republicans rightly called for during yesterday’s hearings. Regardless, we now know from the transcript that it was Biden, not Hur, who brought up the death of his late son Beau, and it was Biden who misremembered his death as having been in 2017 or 2018 instead of 2015.

Suffice it to say that Joe Biden’s mental state is even worse than what was depicted by Hur.

As for the hearings themselves, they were pretty predictable, but the Republicans came out looking better, especially given the Democrats’ maniacal fixation on Donald Trump and their repeated efforts to introduce various forms of the word “exonerate” into the congressional record. Try as they might to get Hur to acquiesce, he refused to bite. Which is good because he absolutely didn’t exonerate Biden.

From committee members Jerry Nadler to Jamie Raskin to Pramila Jayapal, we heard a steady refrain of phrases like “complete and total exoneration.” In the case of Jayapal, Hur went so far as to interrupt her false characterization of a “complete exoneration,” saying, “That is not a word we used in the report. … I did not exonerate him. That word does not appear in my report.”

To which an indignant Jayapal huffed as committee members always do when a witness utters inconvenient truths, “Mr. Hur, it’s my time.”

On the contrary, “Did you reach a conclusion that this man was outright innocent?” asked California Republican Darrell Issa. Hur diplomatically responded, “That conclusion is not reflected in my report, sir.”

In any case, prosecutors don’t typically exonerate. Instead, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, they evaluate whether there’s evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. “If there’s not,” he says, “it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a criminal offense, or that the guy didn’t commit it. It just means you don’t think you have enough evidence to persuade a jury.”

As Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, who once clerked for Clarence Thomas, notes: “In holding classified documents in unsecure locations across decades, Joe Biden was in violation of 18 U.S. Code Section 1924. But, as we know, Mr. Hur exercised his prosecutorial discretion and chose not to prosecute Biden because he thought it unlikely that a jury of his peers would vote unanimously to convict him. … But the key fact here is that Biden himself was never exonerated in this report despite the Democrats’ myriad attempts to claim otherwise.”

Let’s face it: Biden had seven stashes of classified documents in various places, including at the Chinese Communist-funded Biden Center at UPenn, and they were moved multiple times over the years. Biden absolutely knew he was violating the law, and he did so over a period of 40 years. He never had the authority to remove documents from a SCIF — a sensitive compartmentalized information facility — and unlike Donald Trump, he never had the authority to declassify documents.

Indeed, former federal prosecutor and Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy, himself no fan of Trump’s, said he’d much rather have the evidence against Biden than the evidence against Trump if he were prosecuting a case for mishandling documents.

Ultimately, yesterday’s hearings served two purposes: They showed that Biden is a liar, and they showed that he’s also a cognitive mess. Or, as columnist David Harsanyi put it, “The fact remains that there are two ways to look at the Hur report. Either the president lacks the mental acuity to be charged for breaking the law, or he should be charged for breaking the law. Pick one.”

Of course, neither of those points was ever in serious dispute. Is Joe Biden mentally fit to serve as president? No, clearly not. But barring some extraordinary subterfuge or medical occurrence between now and Tuesday, November 5, the Democrats are stuck with him.

Which is fitting indeed since they were guilty of propping him up in the first place.