The Weekly Sift

Don’t be stampeded into freaking out.

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The Hur Report. Thursday, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page document reporting on his investigation into classified documents President Biden returned to the government after they were found among his papers at the University of Delaware and in his home. The conclusion of that report is in its first line:

We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter. We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.

In a report that followed Department of Justice traditions and guidelines, that would be the headline: We looked for evidence of prosecutable crimes and didn’t find any. For comparison, the special prosecutor tasked with investigating classified documents found in former Vice President Pence’s home also decided (last June) that no charges were warranted. The NBC News headline was “DOJ closes Pence classified documents investigation with no charges“.

The second paragraph of such an article would have quoted Hur outlining the difference between this case and former President Trump’s classified documents case:

It is not our role to assess the criminal charges pending against Mr. Trump, but several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear. Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts.

Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview. and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.

But the Hur report was covered very differently, because in addition to summarizing his investigation, Hur also gratuitously speculated on how Biden would defend himself at a trial.

In addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute. When Mr. Biden told his ghostwriter he “just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” he could have been referring to something other than the Afghanistan documents, and our report discusses these possibilities in detail.

We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.

Throughout, the document casts inappropriate and unnecessary aspersions on Biden’s memory and mental processes.

Mr. Biden’s memory also appeared to have significant limitations-both at the time he spoke to [ghostwriter Mark] Zwonitzer in 2017, as evidenced by their recorded conversations, and today, as evidenced by his recorded interview with our office. Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.

Thursday night, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes commented on how needlessly editorialized this was: Painfully? Who was supposed to be in pain? Ordinary human difficulties — struggling to interpret handwritten notes from years ago, or speaking slowly when you are trying to get something exactly right — are cast in the light of disability. The report then continues:

In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.

This, again, paints something perfectly ordinary in a negative light: There’s no indication that Biden has really forgotten “when he was vice president” or “when his son Beau died”, just that he sometimes attaches the wrong year-numbers to these memories. This happens to me (and to Paul Krugman) all the time. A frequent exchange with my wife is “When did we move here? 2018? 2019?” And then we work it out because she was turning 65 and wanted to start Medicare in Massachusetts. Same thing with my father’s death: I know his birth year and that he lived to be 90; that’s the only way I remember what year he died. But I have not at all forgotten “when my father died”; I can tell you precisely where I was and what I was doing.

In general, I remember the years personal events happened only if I’ve had to list them on a resume. (Krugman gives the example of recalling the year his mother died: He figures it out by remembering when he left Princeton for CUNY.) Otherwise, I have to think about it. That’s been true all my life and has nothing to do with aging.

If you can’t identify with those examples because your memory works differently, let me try an analogy: It’s like the difference between forgetting the dates of the Civil War (1861-1865) and forgetting the Civil War. (“Like, didn’t a bunch of states secede once or something?”)

It’s hard to argue with Krugman’s conclusion that the report was written by somebody who knows that Republicans want to make a political issue out of Biden’s mental acuity and wants to help them do it. Hur’s legitimate conclusions as an investigator are of no use in this regard, so he contributes in other ways.

Contrast Hur’s behavior with Jack Smith’s. Smith has played it by the book: He has investigated alleged crimes, and when he has found sufficient evidence, he has presented that evidence in indictments. Does he know other embarrassing details about Donald Trump’s life? Quite possibly. But if they’re irrelevant to the crimes he’s indicting, he doesn’t talk about them.

For example, back in December there were reports in the press that Trump literally stinks “of armpits, ketchup, and butt”. Has Smith’s investigation turned up anything related to that? He hasn’t seen fit to tell us, because reeking is not an indictable crime.

There’s a reason the Justice Department has standards about this kind of thing. Criminal investigation is one of the most invasive things our Constitution allows the government to do. So unless the investigation turns up something actually criminal, investigators should remain circumspect about what they think, and certainly should not use the authority of their investigation to defame or denigrate people they are not prosecuting.

The Egypt/Mexico mistake. Biden was understandably angry with Hur’s report, and held a press conference to say so. Unfortunately, as he was walking out of the room, he took one more question about an unrelated subject: his efforts to negotiate a release of the hostages Hamas is holding. Responding off-the-cuff, he said this:

I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in Gaza — in the Gaza Strip has been over the top.  I think that — as you know, initially, the President of Mexico [Egypt], El-Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in.  I talked to him.  I convinced him to open the gate.

I talked to Bibi to open the gate on the Israeli side.  I’ve been pushing really hard — really hard to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza.  There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s got to stop.

OK, I’m biased to like this statement, because Biden’s views on the Gaza War have shifted in the same direction as mine. (See what I wrote last week.) But there is that mistake: He said “Mexico” when he meant “Egypt”. (Notice: He got the name of Egypt’s president right. So he clearly knew what country he was talking about.)

People have tried to draw a lot of conclusions from this mistake, but again, I do stuff like that all the time. So does Trump. In this clip, for example, he says, “We’re going to defund our freedoms.” (Presumably he meant “defend”.) In this one, he recalls (falsely) what he did after the World Trade Center was attacked on seven-eleven. More recently, he said “Nikki Haley” when he meant “Nancy Pelosi”.

I think most people do stuff like this from time to time: You reach into your mental bag of words in a category, and you come out with the wrong one. (In Biden’s case, the category is “countries on the other side of some significant border”. In Trump’s it’s “women who get in my way.”) Speaker Mike Johnson made a comparable mistake on Meet the Press a week ago yesterday. “We passed the support for Iran many months ago.” (He meant Israel, another Middle Eastern country beginning with I.) Johnson is 52.

Aphasia vs. dementia. Obviously, this kind of mistake happens more often as people get older. I have a lot of experience with this phenomenon, because in his later years, my Dad developed a far worse case of aphasia than anything Biden or Trump have demonstrated. Eventually, it reached the point where he called every meal “lunch”.

But it’s important not to confuse aphasia (problems recalling words) with dementia (problems grasping the situation). For example, Dad saying “lunch” did not reflect any confusion about what time of day it was or when he had eaten last. “Lunch” was just the easiest meal-word to find. (On a road trip, we went to “lunch” first thing in the morning, before getting on the highway. Dad ordered breakfast.)

You might worry that dementia is a natural progression from aphasia, but that’s not how it works. There’s a relationship, but the causality runs in the other direction: Problems in your thinking will lead you to use inappropriate words. But in general, pulling the wrong word out of memory (or no word at all) doesn’t screw up your thinking. So Dad’s aphasia kept getting worse, but he knew who he was, where he was, what he was doing, and who I was all the way up to his last days. (I remember one extreme example: Dad wanted a tool for some home maintenance project he was doing. He couldn’t come up with the name of the tool, the store he wanted to go to, or the street it was on. So he told me to get in the car, and then gave instructions — turn left, turn right — taking us directly to the paint store. He got the tool, we drove home, and he continued his project.)

So I cringed when I heard Biden say “Mexico”, but only because I knew how people would react. His misstatement did not at all cause me to worry that he did not grasp the world situation, or that he would start using the powers of the presidency in some delusional way.

Trump, on the other hand, has lived in a delusional world for decades. In his world, he has always been right, people oppose him because of some inexplicable hatred unrelated to his behavior, he has a mystical “strength” that causes the world to warp around him, his personal charm changes the behavior of dictators, and his wealth comes from mastering “the art of the deal” rather than via a vast inheritance and a lifetime of fraud.

I do not worry that Biden will begin basing his presidential decisions on the kinds of crazy things Trump says all the time: He won’t start pushing quack cures like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, or suggest that doctors look into injecting bleach. He won’t “fall in love” with a psychopathic killer like Kim Jong Un, or decide that Vladimir Putin is more trustworthy than the FBI. He won’t try to change the direction of a hurricane with his sharpie. He won’t claim that windmills kill whales. And he won’t encourage Russia to attack our NATO allies.

Biden will undoubtedly continue to say the wrong words now and then. But I can live with that, because I trust him (and not Trump) to stay rooted in the real world.

If things were worse than that, how would we know? There would be defectors from inside the Biden administration. Unlike Trump, Biden isn’t the focus of a personality cult. People who work with him may like Joe Biden, and they may feel a certain loyalty to him, but they are primarily Americans and Democrats rather than Biden-worshippers. If something were wrong with him that endangered the country and threatened the goals of the Democratic Party, at least a few insiders would come out and say so. Cabinet secretaries, speech writers, White House aides … they’d hate doing it, but at least a few of them would: “It’s worse than it looks,” they’d say. “We have to do something.”

But look around. That’s not happening. The people disparaging Biden’s competence are precisely the people who don’t work with him, the people who wouldn’t know. Even Republicans, like Kevin McCarthy, come out of their dealings with Biden saying that he’s sharper than you think.

What should Biden and the Democrats do? Immediately: nothing.

These last few days, pundits of all sorts have been trying to stampede Biden into resigning or Democrats into abandoning him. This is crazy: Biden has been a very good president and there’s no reason to think he won’t have an equally good second term, despite the unforgivable sin of saying “Mexico” when he meant “Egypt”.

On the flip side of that panic, it’s tempting to want to make some dramatic gesture to prove how sharp Biden is. But that’s likely to be counterproductive in the same way that Richard Nixon saying “I am not a crook” was counterproductive. “I don’t have dementia” is exactly the kind of thing somebody with dementia would say.

Immediately, Biden should let the wave of hysteria pass. Get on with governing. Give a good State of the Union address. Keep working on a truce in Gaza. An oval office message about something else entirely — the importance of not letting Ukraine fall to Russia, for example — would help.

After the dust settles a little, Biden should sit for more one-on-one interviews, like this one he did with John Harwood ten days before his interview the special counsel. When you watch this kind of exchange, you quickly realize that Biden has a mental dexterity Trump lacks: He can listen to a question, process it, and produce a thoughtful answer germane to what was asked. Asking Biden a question is like playing catch: You throw him a question, he fields it, and throws an answer back. But asking Trump a question is like bouncing a rubber ball off an irregular stone wall: It will ricochet quickly, but in a direction that doesn’t seem to have much to do with your throw.

And finally, Biden needs to laugh. This is tricky, but Ronald Reagan pulled it off. When a questioner raised the age issue during a debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, Reagan made a solemn pledge:

I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.