SAUNDERS: President Biden’s recall is so weak he forgot about it

WASHINGTON

President Joe Biden’s memory is even worse than it looks.

That’s the bad news found in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on his criminal investigation of Biden’s habitual mishandling of classified information.

Hur concluded that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” Which, for most of us chickens, would be a crime. But Hur offered he would not charge Biden, 81, because the president likely would present himself to jurors as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

That’s probably how Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping see Biden as well.

The most disturbing news in the Hur report: During an interview, Biden wasn’t sure exactly when he was vice president or in which year his son Beau died.

Talking to reporters Thursday night, Biden vehemently denied that he shared classified information or that had forgotten the time of his son’s death.

It was sad, but I believe Hur.

In the previous week, Biden had been caught saying that he had discussed the Jan. 6, 2021, riots with former French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl — even though they’d been dead for years before the riots.

Americans have been highly skeptical about Biden’s cognitive abilities for some time.

But you also have to question his judgment. Biden’s desire to leave a legacy as a foreign-policy sage led him to hold onto classified documents. And share them with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer.

According to Zwonitzer’s transcripts, Biden knew he was doing the wrong thing, but he couldn’t help himself.

Over the Thanksgiving 2009 holiday, the then-vice president wrote a long, handwritten memo to President Barack Obama to try to persuade his boss not to order a troop surge in Afghanistan. Biden hand-delivered the document to Obama, who did not heed his wing-man’s advice.

Now the president is in trouble because he kept the classified memo and supporting classified documents with little care toward keeping them secure.

The FBI found classified documents in Biden’s Delaware office and, the report noted, “in a badly damaged box in the garage, 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.”

It’s impossible to read that description and not think of the boxes of classified documents found in a shower and ballroom in former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, for which Trump has been charged criminally.

Biden wondered how Trump could be so irresponsible with data that could compromise intelligence sources and methods. And still, Biden did the same thing. Did he not realize that?

Hur laid out the differences between Biden and Trump. The biggie is that Trump refused to return the documents for months, and otherwise impeded an investigation.

Biden, to his credit and unlike Trump, cooperated with authorities and sat down for an interview.

Still, Biden apparently broke the law, but he won’t be prosecuted for it because, really, it just wouldn’t look right for federal prosecutors to pick on the old guy.

Which is exactly why Biden shouldn’t be president.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.