A new report from the Department of Justice Special Counsel on Thursday recommended that President Joe Biden not be prosecuted despite determining that he’d mishandled classified documents. The reason? The report claimed that the jury might find Biden to be too sympathetic, “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” reported the Washington Post.
The matter-of-fact revelations about the extent of Biden’s memory problems contained in the report had people online gasping at some of the apparent gaps in the president’s memory.
“this is uh extremely bad,” posted @solldermuell on X, citing a section of the report where investigators claimed that Biden didn’t remember when he stopped being vice president.
The investigation into Biden centered around boxes of classified documents about former President Barack Obama’s 2009 Afghanistan troop surge.
Biden, who was Obama’s vice president at the time, had led an unsuccessful internal debate opposing the surge, viewing it as a “mistake on par with Vietnam,” according to the report. The documents were found in a badly damaged box in Biden’s garage in Delaware “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.”
According to the report the classified documents were filed by Biden himself, something supported by the fact that they were found next to documents of “personal importance” to him, including photographs of his son Beau, who died in 2015 of brain cancer.
While the Special Counsel report found that they believed Biden had mishandled the classified documents willingly, they also said that his memory “was significantly limited,” which could make prosecuting him difficult.
“His cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully—that is, with intent to break the law—as the statute requires,” the report said.
“Sure this doesn’t sound GREAT but I don’t see anyone talking about his occasionally perfect recall of summer days from 1953,” wrote @MichaelChasin. “You’d think he was reliving them, the way he talks sometimes! So, it’s impossible to say how he’s doing.”
“His defeat of CornPop is fresh in his mind,” replied @_cashcarstar, referencing an odd rambling story Biden once told about his days as a lifeguard back in the day. “I trust him with foreign policy decisions.”
Biden, who at 80 is the oldest sitting president in U.S. history, has been questioned about his mental fitness for the role, particularly by his Republican critics. But it’s not just Republicans who believe that he might be slipping. According to a recent NBC poll, 76% of voters, and half of all Democrats, are concerned about his age.
This week, Biden told stories about discussing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot with two European leaders who both died well before the riot took place.
And while the White House put out a statement saying that they “disagree with a number of inaccurate and inappropriate comments” in the report, that didn’t alleviate most people’s worries.
“No one over 65 should be running for Public Office,” posted @_B0lt. “Give everyone who runs for Public Office an entrance exam and aptitude test. Theyre the only job in America with no previous qualifications needed; you just need money to campaign.”
Not everybody was disappointed though.
“I for one am looking forward to America’s Mad King arc,” commented @Maii_Degeese.
