Definitely not exonerated

The spin on Hur's testimony is not impressing me, except with its gall.

MR. HUR: So during this time when you were living at Chain Bridge Road and there were documents relating to the Penn Biden Center, or the Biden Institute, or the Cancer Moonshot, or your book, where did you keep papers that related to those things that you were actively working on?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, um .. . I , I, I, I, I don’ t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?

MR. HUR: Yes, sir.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Remember, in this timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the President. I’m not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point — even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for President. And, and so what was happening, though – what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th –

MS. COTTON: 2015.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Was it 2015 he had died?

I don't doubt that the President has a sharp memory of the terrible day his son died. But no one claimed he'd forgotten the death, only that he couldn't accurately place it within a couple of years, not even by considering whether it was before or after 2017, when he stopped being Vice President. Most people can place recent presidential administrations in their proper annual timeframes, even if they weren't actually in the White House at the time. For this reason among others, Hur concluded that, although the evidence of Biden's habitual mishandling classified documents was unmistakeable, it was too much to expect a (biased, DC-based) jury to look past his obvious mental decline. Calling this "exoneration" is appalling, as is the allegation that Hur's extremely soft-pedaled description of Biden's entirely relevant decrepitude was overly harsh. Nor is it possible to argue with a straight face that Hur dragged in Beau Biden's death unnecessarily; Joe Biden popped it into the conversation in his usual manner of changing a dangerous conversational focus to a more sympathetic context. Pure squid ink.

As for Adam Schiff's take on this, if he were capable of shame, I'd say he ought to be ashamed. Even he must know the difference between including information in a special prosecutor's report that might prejudice a potential defendant's to a fair trial, versus information that might prejudice his success in a current or future political campaign. Hur rightly nailed Schiff on this point.