While wise words, it’s a change of tone from Rep. Schiff’s comments at a March 12 congressional hearing, in which he blasted a witness who suggested Biden might be suffering from age-related memory loss as disloyal and partisan.
“You understood the impact of your decision to go beyond the details of specific documents and into your own personal biases and subjective opinions about the president,” Schiff lectured. “You knew that those opinions would be amplified by your political opponents. You knew that it would impact a political campaign. You had to understand that, and you did it anyway.”
The witness was Robert K. Hur, the special counsel whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to investigate Biden’s possession of classified documents after he left the vice presidency in 2017. Hur, a Republican but not particularly partisan, had decided not to indict Biden. But Schiff and other Democrats tried to discredit him over his explanation for why he made that decision. As Hur wrote in his report to Garland, he believed that after an interview in which Biden rambled and struggled to recall facts and events, jurors would have reasonable doubt about the criminal intent of a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
With the 81-year-old Biden’s reelection campaign now in jeopardy after his stumble in the debate with former President Trump, Hoare’s report was clearly exactly the kind of objective, honest outsider reporting that Schiff now advocates for.
Regardless of how the current debacle ultimately unfolds, it’s worth revisiting Hoare’s case as a key chapter in a seemingly concerted effort by the White House and its political allies to fend off legitimate questions about the president’s fitness to serve.
Essentially, Heo was the subject of a smear campaign.
It began even before Garland released Hur’s report on Feb. 8. “The global and pejorative judgment on the President’s general memory is unnecessary and without merit,” Biden’s lawyers wrote to Garland on Feb. 7.
An infuriated President Biden used mild swearing at a hastily called press conference the night the report was released, declaring his own memory “fine” and criticizing Heo for asking when his son Bo had died — though a transcript later showed that the president had actually misremembered an exchange in which he brought up the topic.
Vice President Harris said on February 9: “The behavior of the president as described in the report is completely at odds with the facts and clearly politically motivated. And so I would say that the role and responsibility of prosecutors in these situations demands a higher level of integrity than we’ve seen.”
What followed were stilted social media posts and media commentaries attacking Heo’s sentence, peppered with words like “unfair,” “inappropriate,” and “unprofessional.” Ironically, the stoning of heretics culminated in the aforementioned March 12 hearing convened by the Republican majority of the House Judiciary Committee to condemn Heo for not suing Biden.
Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) went so far as to go beyond Harris’s attacks on Hahr’s “integrity,” accusing Hahr of “doing everything he can to help President Trump get re-elected, either to be a federal judge or to be appointed to another position in the Department of Justice, or not?” – a charge Hahr credibly denies.
If the Democratic Party had taken Heo’s report as a warning rather than denying it so vehemently, it may not be in the predicament it finds itself in today, and this shrewd and professional lawyer certainly would not have had his reputation tarnished.
To be sure, there are legitimate questions about whether Heo’s report is more detailed than Justice Department rules would suggest, since in such a high-profile case the attorney general would be obligated to release what are technically classified documents.
However, it is clear that the only partisan attacks here were made by Heo’s critics.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is fighting a House subpoena for the audio recordings of Hoare’s interview with Biden, citing executive privilege and the need to uphold Department of Justice procedures. Opponents of release argue (plausibly) that the public records contain all the relevant information and that the House Republican majority is merely seeking to politicize the audio.
Events since June 27 have shifted the balance. If the president and his team are as confident in his fitness to act as they say they are, they should stop opposing disclosure. They should try transparency. The campaign’s stubbornness has failed.
