Former assistant US Attorney and CNN legal analyst Elie Honig might have had the most grounded take on CNN concerning Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Joe Biden’s classified document fiasco. The night this report was released—February 8—it was Honig who offered a more somber take, notably how Biden came to the water’s edge regarding criminal charges and how the president willfully retained classified materials and lied to the American people about it. He elaborated more about this in an article for the Intelligencer while painstakingly stating that Donald Trump’s classified document scandal is worse than the president leaving classified materials in multiple locations.
He is fair in one regard: he noted that Hur had to point out Biden’s cognitive issues per department policy. He may disagree with the language, but Honig also said that if Democrats are mad about this report, they must be equally appalled at the Robert Mueller report, which was brutal toward then-President Trump but carried no charges. I’m not holding my breath, so the hubbub over the passages about Biden’s memory is an act. The CNN analyst does include his reasons for why Biden willfully took classified materials on national security—and it involves Joe Biden.
Joe feels he was right about Afghanistan, which fell back under Taliban control under his presidency. He wanted to keep those documents to prove he was right and Obama was wrong. The man has been wrong about foreign policy for over four decades—I guess Biden felt he needed evidence to show there was something in the ‘W’ column to that end. In the process, Joe broke the law and lied about it.
As Honig did on the night the report dropped, he listed Biden's lies about Hur’s conclusions. He didn’t cooperate with this investigation; he willfully retained documents—it wasn’t staff error—and disclosed said sensitive materials to his ghostwriter, who promptly deleted the tapes when he found they were under federal investigation (via Intelligencer):
For anyone howling about Hur’s report, let’s recognize, first, that he had to write it. Federal regulations require that, at the end of the investigation, the special counsel must create a report “explaining the prosecution or declination decisions.” Now, one could fairly take issue with how Hur wrote the report. We don’t want prosecutors flaming people they don’t indict, after all, and Hur drafted a 300-plus page tome that included damaging revelations (at times with excessive flourishes) about Biden and others around him. I’ll allow that objection on one condition: You also must be on record condemning another special counsel, Robert Mueller, who wrote a 400-plus page report excoriating Donald Trump without recommending indictment. It’s entirely fair to argue that prosecutors should either charge or stay as mum as possible, or that the special counsel rules are a mess — but it has to work both ways.
Hur’s report is essentially a prosecution memo, a standard document in which prosecutors lay out their evidence and consider the arguments for and against indicting.
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The report states on page one that the investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency.” If that sounds familiar, it might be because Trump now faces 32 felony counts in Florida (brought by a higher-profile DOJ special counsel, Jack Smith) for willful retention of national defense information, a federal crime. Hur comprehensively lays out the evidence, and the difficulties a prosecution might face, including the challenge of establishing Biden’s criminal intent. The special counsel’s account of Biden’s mental acuity feels overstated and unnecessarily colorful to me, but it’s a relevant factor that weighs considerably in Hur’s assessment of the case’s shortcomings. Further complicating the picture: Biden had several different batches of classified materials circulating around his Delaware-Virginia-D.C. home-office ecosystem, and he plainly did not know about some of the documents — but, as we’ll discuss in a moment, he absolutely did know about others.
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Here’s the report’s biggest revelation: Biden held on to classified top-secret national-security documents after he left the vice-presidency, and he did it intentionally. This was no accident. Biden had those documents for this specific reason: He believed he had been right on American policy in Afghanistan (and that President Barack Obama had been wrong), and he wanted to paint himself as the visionary hero (and Obama as the heel) in the historical narrative. That’s why Biden shared some of their contents with his ghostwriter — though Hur acknowledges that Biden may have disclosed that classified information inadvertently, citing Biden’s “lapses in attention and vigilance.”
Here’s the single most important piece of evidence in Hur’s report: In a recording made by the ghostwriter in February 2017 — a month after Biden left the vice-presidency — Biden says he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” That, folks, is the needle-scratch moment. Up until last week, the party line has essentially been, “Hey, classified documents are strewn all around the White House, a bunch of boxes got moved around, transition is chaotic, documents end up in various places; big mistake, whoops, sorry.” Now we know that’s untrue.
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In an official statement issued just after Hur’s report became public, the president proclaimed that he “cooperated completely, threw up no roadblocks, and sought no delays.” I’ll give him “cooperated” — but not “completely,” not anymore.
Timing is key here. Think back to that February 2017 recording, when Biden said he “found all the classified stuff downstairs.” What did Biden do back then? Did he have his people get right on the phone with the Archives or the FBI to turn the documents back in? Nope. He kept those sensitive documents and said nothing for five more years. Not until 2022 — after the FBI executed its search warrant on Trump at Mar-a-Lago — did Biden’s people alert the authorities.
Honig reiterated that Biden’s classified document dance came within a “razor’s-edge” of criminal charges. But this piece, while fair, will be shredded by liberals angered that the CNN commentator would even entertain “bothsideism,” which they will accuse Honig of channeling when he references the Mueller and Hur reports. Trump is evil; therefore, anything deflecting from that shouldn’t be considered or respected. This attitude has led to institutional erosion and outright illegal activities from those within powerful agencies who feel that way toward the former president. A case in point is that a judge ordered the former president to pay over $350 million and barred him from operating a corporate entity in New York for three years over an alleged bank loan scandal, where no one lost money. The Left has taken a dangerous stance: we must ignore or destroy certain constitutional norms to save the country.
That fear of “bothsideism” is present in this part of Honig’s piece:
“Trump’s conduct was worse than Biden’s. I’ll say it again: Trump’s conduct was worse. That’s a plain, irrefutable truth… But Biden’s conduct is indefensible nonetheless,” he wrote.
It’s the last part that will infuriate liberals. Still, the piece diffuses much of the Left’s rancor over Hur's report and its contents and calls out the president for lying about keeping stuff he shouldn’t have and telling people who weren’t cleared about it. This man's ego to keep Afghanistan policy-related documents because he wanted to tell his former boss, Obama, to shove it isn’t surprising. Still, it does expose once again that Biden is an idiot who can’t get out of his own way. Now, he falls over. Look, it's a CNN person making these arguments, but he slaps down some of the liberal media's loudest war cries on this topic.
Then again, while he adds that an indictment would've been worse than not being charged but subjected to political damage, Biden's team feels otherwise. They've been sweating over this report because legal commentary can't be sold in a 30-second bite. Democratic strategists know that many will see Biden just as guilty for the offenses Trump is accused of committing—maybe because that's precisely the case.