Posted on Jul 10, 2023
Should POTUS Biden ask Congress to take $360 Billion from climate change and reallocate it to emergency ordnance resupply?
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President Biden told our adversaries on 7-9-2023 that we are low on Artillery ammunition. I bet if President Trump did this in a TV interview, we would have an impeachment proceeding.
+++++Update 1-10-2024
The Recent Houthis attack on shipping has caused the US Navy to spend $17 million in shooting down 24 drones in one day. The US Destroyers and US Navy aircraft has expended about $80 million just in the last 2 months. The Stupid Biden Administration has this slush fund to go green that should be used to resupply our US military.
+++++Update 10-7-2023 Israel now getting USA emergency resupply of Artillery and laser-guided Bombs+++++ Political Climate Change is more important than this 'Climate Emergency'. I do not care what President Biden and Greta Thunberg say....
The Inflation Reduction Act was a crock of crap. It was basically a Trojan horse Green New Deal. Over $360 billion dollars of this measure was immediately touted by President Biden and by climate Czar John Kerry as a means to help other countries go green by bribes or by buying hardware from communist China. America First not America Last like President Mr. Magoo Biden leads from the rear and says stupid things like "God Save the Queen, Man!."
President Biden has claimed that 'Climate change aka Global Warming or AKA Climate Emergency' is the biggest existential threat. The earth is warming anyways, why bother? We have gone through warming periods and ice ages for billions of years.
Climate Change? Never mind that our artillery inventory is running extremely low.
Climate Change? Never mind that China has built four aircraft carriers in the last 5 Years with a specific intent to defend or screen US Navy forces from getting close to Taiwan because those baby flat tops will carry anti-ship missiles as well as nuclear weapons.
I suggest that Congress and the foolish President come forth with a plan to do an Operation Warp Speed for Ordnance of all kinds as well as doubling or tripling our capacity in restocking our heavy artillery and our Navy ordnance. This also includes Tank Production and Anti-tank weapons as well.
Before the War Began in Ukraine or continued after February of 2023, Taiwan had ordered 108 Abrams main battle tanks. We only have one major tank Factory in Ohio with 800 workers. Making a dozen tanks a month is not going to help matters when you have Taiwan competing with Poland and other NATO countries that also want the M1A2 tanks. Taiwan just got 2 Abrams tanks in June. This will take a decade with the slow production and high demand of MBTs.
President Biden and Janet Yellen are kind of like Mr. Rogers and Mr. Magoo of diplomats. They're too nice and too naive and try to kiss ass to China when the Chinese Premiere is telling his People's Liberation Army Navy to get ready for the invasion of Taiwan. Janet Yellen bowed to the Vice-President of China. We bow to nobody! The Chinese blow us off and we kiss their asses. This shows signs of weakness which is the SOP for the Biden Administration.
President Biden is a horrible president who says that we are in 'competition' with China when China is not playing fair and threatening their neighbors.
We should have something like a President Trump Operation Warp Speed. Democrats try revisionism saying that President Trump didn't have a vaccine mitigation plan when he had a Logistics four-star General work with the pharmaceutical companies to produce the vaccines in a proper time frame. They were not perfect and yet President Biden and his missing Vice-President Harris were all given the vaccinations before they took office. They claim they didn't have a plan when they did.
That being said, the US should go on a war footing we should triple our capacity and make 155mm and other artillery shells. We should increase our production of anti-ship missiles, torpedoes and Javelin missile systems that Taiwan has also ordered and has to wait a year or more to get.
Looking at history, in 2018, a four-star Admiral going for his Ambassadorship (Harry Harris) warned about Taiwan being threatened by China in the South China Sea.
You have the current and former four-star Admirals of the Pacific Command warning about a possible war with China. You had a one-star Admiral Warren warn Congress three years ago that we were probably going to be fighting China by 2027 yet our Mr Magoo President still thinks that you can be nice to China when China is stabbing Us in the back, stealing our trade Secrets and using their united front not to mention probably sneaking agents into the poorest Southern Border in preparation of having us have civil Strife and sabotage at the right time.
Canada is one of the five eyes and their intelligence Services have given a high threat to communist China and its potential to invade Taiwan. I'm sure all other four members of the five eyes concur but President Biden still thinks that 'climate change' is number one. The earth is warming no matter what we do and a limited nuclear war will mean cooler weather and no more need for electric cars and Green Energy.
The war in Ukraine is at a stalemate and going to Cluster Munitions because we are out of regular high-explosive Munitions means that we don't have the capacity when we should go to an all-war footing. In World War II we had the Singer sewing machine and many other companies including General Motors making weapons of war. I'm sure we have enough idle plants around, especially with President Biden's bad tax and spend (Anti -Trickle Down STUPID policies) are not helping at all. His anti-supply side economics
is slowing the economy down with his stupid inflation and raising interest rates. People are getting laid off so why don't we take the $360 billion dollars that we would have used to bribe other countries and use this money to support and rebuild our infrastructure of producing tanks, producing Naval weaponry and artillery shells?
The US Navy said that they would only be able to last about one week fighting a war with China because torpedo, missile and artillery supplies would be depleted after about a week.
So much for the peace dividend of the Church of the bad Green New Deal that buys everything through communist China.
Golf Delta climate change is not the biggest existential threat. President Biden telling our adversaries on TV on July 9th, 2023 that we are short on ammunition is the wrong thing to do. If President Trump would have said something like this, you know Congress would have done articles of impeachment.
Went in a bad peace, prepare for war and NOT climate change because you will get your global cooling by a limited nuclear war but the left doesn't want to tell you this. They want to scare you to take money away from defense as a united front fifth column paranoia to divide us from within.
+++++Update 1-10-2024
The Recent Houthis attack on shipping has caused the US Navy to spend $17 million in shooting down 24 drones in one day. The US Destroyers and US Navy aircraft has expended about $80 million just in the last 2 months. The Stupid Biden Administration has this slush fund to go green that should be used to resupply our US military.
+++++Update 10-7-2023 Israel now getting USA emergency resupply of Artillery and laser-guided Bombs+++++ Political Climate Change is more important than this 'Climate Emergency'. I do not care what President Biden and Greta Thunberg say....
The Inflation Reduction Act was a crock of crap. It was basically a Trojan horse Green New Deal. Over $360 billion dollars of this measure was immediately touted by President Biden and by climate Czar John Kerry as a means to help other countries go green by bribes or by buying hardware from communist China. America First not America Last like President Mr. Magoo Biden leads from the rear and says stupid things like "God Save the Queen, Man!."
President Biden has claimed that 'Climate change aka Global Warming or AKA Climate Emergency' is the biggest existential threat. The earth is warming anyways, why bother? We have gone through warming periods and ice ages for billions of years.
Climate Change? Never mind that our artillery inventory is running extremely low.
Climate Change? Never mind that China has built four aircraft carriers in the last 5 Years with a specific intent to defend or screen US Navy forces from getting close to Taiwan because those baby flat tops will carry anti-ship missiles as well as nuclear weapons.
I suggest that Congress and the foolish President come forth with a plan to do an Operation Warp Speed for Ordnance of all kinds as well as doubling or tripling our capacity in restocking our heavy artillery and our Navy ordnance. This also includes Tank Production and Anti-tank weapons as well.
Before the War Began in Ukraine or continued after February of 2023, Taiwan had ordered 108 Abrams main battle tanks. We only have one major tank Factory in Ohio with 800 workers. Making a dozen tanks a month is not going to help matters when you have Taiwan competing with Poland and other NATO countries that also want the M1A2 tanks. Taiwan just got 2 Abrams tanks in June. This will take a decade with the slow production and high demand of MBTs.
President Biden and Janet Yellen are kind of like Mr. Rogers and Mr. Magoo of diplomats. They're too nice and too naive and try to kiss ass to China when the Chinese Premiere is telling his People's Liberation Army Navy to get ready for the invasion of Taiwan. Janet Yellen bowed to the Vice-President of China. We bow to nobody! The Chinese blow us off and we kiss their asses. This shows signs of weakness which is the SOP for the Biden Administration.
President Biden is a horrible president who says that we are in 'competition' with China when China is not playing fair and threatening their neighbors.
We should have something like a President Trump Operation Warp Speed. Democrats try revisionism saying that President Trump didn't have a vaccine mitigation plan when he had a Logistics four-star General work with the pharmaceutical companies to produce the vaccines in a proper time frame. They were not perfect and yet President Biden and his missing Vice-President Harris were all given the vaccinations before they took office. They claim they didn't have a plan when they did.
That being said, the US should go on a war footing we should triple our capacity and make 155mm and other artillery shells. We should increase our production of anti-ship missiles, torpedoes and Javelin missile systems that Taiwan has also ordered and has to wait a year or more to get.
Looking at history, in 2018, a four-star Admiral going for his Ambassadorship (Harry Harris) warned about Taiwan being threatened by China in the South China Sea.
You have the current and former four-star Admirals of the Pacific Command warning about a possible war with China. You had a one-star Admiral Warren warn Congress three years ago that we were probably going to be fighting China by 2027 yet our Mr Magoo President still thinks that you can be nice to China when China is stabbing Us in the back, stealing our trade Secrets and using their united front not to mention probably sneaking agents into the poorest Southern Border in preparation of having us have civil Strife and sabotage at the right time.
Canada is one of the five eyes and their intelligence Services have given a high threat to communist China and its potential to invade Taiwan. I'm sure all other four members of the five eyes concur but President Biden still thinks that 'climate change' is number one. The earth is warming no matter what we do and a limited nuclear war will mean cooler weather and no more need for electric cars and Green Energy.
The war in Ukraine is at a stalemate and going to Cluster Munitions because we are out of regular high-explosive Munitions means that we don't have the capacity when we should go to an all-war footing. In World War II we had the Singer sewing machine and many other companies including General Motors making weapons of war. I'm sure we have enough idle plants around, especially with President Biden's bad tax and spend (Anti -Trickle Down STUPID policies) are not helping at all. His anti-supply side economics
is slowing the economy down with his stupid inflation and raising interest rates. People are getting laid off so why don't we take the $360 billion dollars that we would have used to bribe other countries and use this money to support and rebuild our infrastructure of producing tanks, producing Naval weaponry and artillery shells?
The US Navy said that they would only be able to last about one week fighting a war with China because torpedo, missile and artillery supplies would be depleted after about a week.
So much for the peace dividend of the Church of the bad Green New Deal that buys everything through communist China.
Golf Delta climate change is not the biggest existential threat. President Biden telling our adversaries on TV on July 9th, 2023 that we are short on ammunition is the wrong thing to do. If President Trump would have said something like this, you know Congress would have done articles of impeachment.
Went in a bad peace, prepare for war and NOT climate change because you will get your global cooling by a limited nuclear war but the left doesn't want to tell you this. They want to scare you to take money away from defense as a united front fifth column paranoia to divide us from within.
Edited 2 y ago
Posted >1 y ago
Responses: 25
The CIC is a civilian for a reason, his\her focus goes beyond just one front, one battle. Even militarily, it makes no sense to pull away, weaken the nation engaged in a global existential war to purchase weaponry that can be funded from the profits of the MIC.
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LTC Stephen Conway
Biden had 5 deferment. Trump 4. The Media Protects Biden and sucks his pee pee.
SFC Ralph E Kelley MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. SFC Bernard Walko PO3 Shayne Seibert LTC Trent Klug CSM Charles Hayden Passed 7/29/2025 SrA Bruce Banner LTC John Wilson
SFC Ralph E Kelley MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. SFC Bernard Walko PO3 Shayne Seibert LTC Trent Klug CSM Charles Hayden Passed 7/29/2025 SrA Bruce Banner LTC John Wilson
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LTC Stephen Conway
Airstrike Scene (Broken Arrow)
We Were Soldiers 2002 - Rent or own full movie: https://amzn.to/3GMsd9lBased upon the best-selling book "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young" by Lt. Gen. Har...
SFC Bernard Walko A leftist doing that is losing an Argument/cornered so he insults you and calls Broken arrow. The Truth destroys a leftie. I get that on Facebook as well.
https://youtu.be/k487rUfjbjA?si=sH90Cr22UA4w-8rY
SFC Ralph E Kelley MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. SFC Bernard Walko PO3 Shayne Seibert PO3 Shayne Seibert LTC Trent Klug SrA Bruce Banner CSM Charles Hayden Passed 7/29/2025 LTC John Wilson
https://youtu.be/k487rUfjbjA?si=sH90Cr22UA4w-8rY
SFC Ralph E Kelley MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. SFC Bernard Walko PO3 Shayne Seibert PO3 Shayne Seibert LTC Trent Klug SrA Bruce Banner CSM Charles Hayden Passed 7/29/2025 LTC John Wilson
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LTC Trent Klug
Way to go Al! Thanks for your comment. I'm sure there's another seminar you can attend for your progressive talking points. Joey Bagohammers and Cackles McGee appreciate your support. Now, point to the areas on the doll where Trump hurt you.
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So how sweet does drumps a** smell to you, by the way would you let him baby sit your daughter and are you a sucker and a loser for serving in the military like I am ?
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LTC John Wilson
While we're on the subject of picking babysitters, given how Donald Trumps children turned out, I wouldn't have an issue with him watching mine for a few hours.
Contrast that with Biden's crack addicted son and the fact that he showered with his own daughter, I'd call Child Protective Services on you if you hire Biden to babysit for you (https://www.newsweek.com/ashley-biden-diary-confirmed-what-more-do-we-now-know-1900509 , https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/joe-biden-s-daughter-ashley-admits-her-diary-entries-are-real-in-court-letter-showers-with-dad/ar-BB1mWabj?ocid=BingNewsSearch)
Contrast that with Biden's crack addicted son and the fact that he showered with his own daughter, I'd call Child Protective Services on you if you hire Biden to babysit for you (https://www.newsweek.com/ashley-biden-diary-confirmed-what-more-do-we-now-know-1900509 , https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/joe-biden-s-daughter-ashley-admits-her-diary-entries-are-real-in-court-letter-showers-with-dad/ar-BB1mWabj?ocid=BingNewsSearch)
Ashley Biden diary confirmed: What more do we now know?
A change to a Fact Check about Ashley Biden's diary has led to a wave of conservative commentary.
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SPC Michael Carney
LTC Stephen Conway I never drank his kool-aid either and trump is the one that called the military sucker's and lovers, as far as baby sitting, well, he might date your daughter the way he said he would date his own,...signed, just like you from a sucker and loser.
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SPC Michael Carney
Don't respect my feelings and I'll be dang sure not to respect yours let's just have our own opinions and support our service to our country. And, Sir, Thank you for your service.
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LTC John Wilson
SPC Michael Carney - Again, the "suckers and losers" comment has been proven an OBJECTIVE LIE!
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PO2 Mike Brinningstaull
PO2 Mike Brinningstaull did Trump give us a raise or did he just disparage our military and dishonor those who actually fought for this country. Maybe you and I can help save something for the next generation.
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LTC Stephen Conway
PO2 Mike Brinningstaull by Alvin Bragg? His conviction will fail in all federal courts. 1 count Expired Misdemeanor turned into 34 Felonies that are invalid due to statute of limitations. Watch Alvin Bragg be disbarred for his illegal lawfare.
SFC Ralph E Kelley SFC Bernard Walko MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO3 Shayne Seibert CSM Charles Hayden Passed 7/29/2025 SrA Bruce Banner LTC Trent Klug SrA Bruce Banner LTC John Wilson
SFC Ralph E Kelley SFC Bernard Walko MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO3 Shayne Seibert CSM Charles Hayden Passed 7/29/2025 SrA Bruce Banner LTC Trent Klug SrA Bruce Banner LTC John Wilson
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LTC Stephen Conway
PO2 Mike Brinningstaull Biden got a pass by the way on his classified info stolen as a Senator in boxes next to his Corvette. HRC got a pass for destroying cell phones and wiping her server clean. The Deep State protects Democrats but goes after Trump.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-impossible-role-of-robert-hur#:~:text=But%20the%20failing%2Dmemory%20issue,part%20because%20of%20his%20memory...
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Daily Comment
Why Robert Hur Called Biden an “Elderly Man with a Poor Memory”
In his first interview after the release of his controversial report, the former special counsel insists that it was not his job to write for the public.
By Jeannie Suk Gersen
March 22, 2024
Collage illustration of Robert Hur and Joe Biden
Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photographs from Getty
Save this story
When I first approached Robert Hur for an interview, soon after his appointment as special counsel, fourteen months ago, he demurred, saying, “I’m boring.” Then his circumstances changed. When we finally met, he pulled up in an armored black government S.U.V., accompanied by two U.S. marshals. Hur had completed his report on whether President Joe Biden had mishandled classified documents—he had declined to prosecute Biden but had impugned the President’s memory in the process—and members of both parties were furious. “I knew it was going to be unpleasant,” he told me this past week, “but the level of vitriol—it’s hard to know exactly how intense that’s going to be until the rotten fruit is being thrown at you.”
Hur’s report stated that his investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice-presidency when he was a private citizen.” Yet Hur concluded that “the evidence does not establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” He reasoned 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.” In Hur’s view, “it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
The report was designated confidential, but the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, had already promised to make as much as possible of it public. When he did so, on February 8th, Biden immediately held a press conference, which turned chaotic. Reporters yelled over each other, and Biden pushed back on Hur’s characterization of him, saying, “I’m well-meaning and I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing.” The President was particularly incensed by Hur’s claim that he did not recall what year his son Beau had died: “How in the hell dare he raise that.” Afterward, the White House continued to fight back, calling the references to the President’s memory “unnecessary, inflammatory, and prejudicial statements” that are “unsupported personal opinion criticism on uncharged conduct that is outside the Special Counsel’s expertise and remit.” (The Justice Department immediately defended Hur’s report as entirely consistent with legal requirements and Department policies.)
This past week, during a four-hour hearing in Congress, lawmakers from both political parties rebuked Hur. Republicans accused him of going easy on the President by not charging him despite the evidence of criminality; Democrats alleged that, because Hur could not indict the President, he had set out to hurt Biden politically. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, claimed that Hur had deliberately played “into the Republicans’ narrative that the President is unfit for office because he is senile.”
During his time as special counsel, Hur refused to speak to the press, but, shortly after he gave his congressional testimony, we sat down for a conversation, in which we spoke about his approach to prosecution, his commitment to the United States as the son of Korean immigrants, and why he took the special-counsel job. As we delved into how he wrote the report—and I shared some of my own concerns about his approach—it became clear to me that we were talking across something of a disconnect, between what the public needs from a special counsel and how a well-trained Justice Department prosecutor conceives of the role.
From the beginning, the investigation into President Biden has been double-edged: it was always about both Biden and Donald Trump. In September, 2022, after the F.B.I. found that Trump had taken boxes of classified documents from the White House and stored them at Mar-a-Lago, Biden called Trump’s conduct “totally irresponsible.” Two months later—shortly before the special counsel Jack Smith was appointed to investigate Trump’s alleged election interference and retention of classified documents—Biden’s lawyers alerted the government that boxes of materials from the Obama Administration had been found at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank where Biden spent time after his Vice-Presidency. The boxes contained some classified documents, and subsequent searches found more, at Biden’s Wilmington home and at the University of Delaware. In January, 2023, without informing the President, Garland appointed Robert Hur to investigate Biden’s retention of classified documents.
According to Justice Department regulations, a special counsel must be a lawyer selected from outside the federal government “with a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking” and “appropriate experience.” Hur was an obvious choice. At fifty-one, he had spent a total of fifteen years at the Justice Department, including roles as the top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—which involved work on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election—and as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland. Hur, a registered Republican, was nominated to the U.S. Attorney role by Trump (and confirmed unanimously by the Senate), but he insists that he does not have a partisan mind-set. “I’m just doing the work,” he told me. “I don’t have a particular ideology or crusade that I’m trying to go after.” When news broke of his appointment as special counsel, many of his friends, Democrats and Republicans alike, were supportive but said it was a little crazy to take such a thankless job. It was guaranteed that “this part of the country, or that part of the country,” he said, raising his arms to shape the two swaths, would be angry with him.
I asked Hur why he accepted the appointment. He explained that much of it had to do with his family’s history. His mother’s family fled from North Korea to South Korea shortly before the Korean War. Hur’s parents arrived in the U.S. in the early seventies, and he was born soon after. His father, now retired, was an anesthesiologist, and his mother, who trained as a nurse, managed her husband’s medical practice. “I know that my parents’ lives and my life would have been very, very different if it were not for this country and American soldiers in Korea during the Korean War,” Hur said. “There is a real debt that my family and I have to this country. And in my view, if you’re in a position where the Attorney General of the United States says there is a need for someone to do a particularly unpleasant task, if it’s something that you can do, ethically and consistent with your own moral compass, then you should do it.”
Hur grew up in the Los Angeles area, where he attended Harvard School for Boys (now a coed school called Harvard-Westlake). He recalled that the actor Tori Spelling was at the sister school: “There were lots of Hollywood people. I felt very much an outsider from all of that because of my strict Korean upbringing.” He explained, “It was quite stern. Excellence was expected. Fun was severely optional.” He played piano and violin. “I played drums, too, for a while,” he said, “because that was my form of rebellion.”
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Hur went to Harvard for college, where, he said, he was “regularly floored by how effortlessly classmates of mine could become fluent in things that took me quite a while to get on top of.” He continued, “I’ve never been the person whom people look at and say, ‘That person is a rare generational brain.’ But I’m going to work harder and grind it out.” He started out studying premed but was “weeded out” by a course in organic chemistry. He went on to study English, and wrote a thesis that was “an ethical analysis of William Faulkner’s ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ ” Hur traces his interest in literature to his high-school English teachers, who included the journalist Caitlin Flanagan. Flanagan remembers Hur, too—she recently chided him on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” saying, “As I taught Robert and so many students fortunate enough to benefit from my tutelage, when writing, the most important thing in an essay is we keep related ideas together.” She continued, to big laughs from the studio audience, “Robert, the assignment is ‘Should criminal charges be issued for this thing?,’ not ‘Can you give us an armchair neurological report of the man you’re investigating?’ ”
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Contrary to the stoic persona he displayed at the congressional hearing, Hur is lively and humorous in person. But I couldn’t help but connect his self-described fun-optional upbringing—and the unspoken pressures of being the first nonwhite person in this very prominent job—with his insistence that his work as a prosecutor is plodding and not creative. “I view it almost like an engineering task or a construction task. I am building a case,” he told me. “There are planks and nails and hammers. How does this thing get built with the requisite solidity and seaworthiness that it actually will hold up?” His goal, as special counsel, was to call as little attention to his work as he could. He resigned before his congressional testimony, he explained, simply because his predecessors had. “Look, if Mueller did it this way, then there must be some reasons,” Hur said. “I don’t want to make history here.”
Hur’s report was refreshingly blunt and direct, but it still led to misunderstandings. The White House and Democrats have managed to spin his conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to convict Biden as something separate from his observations about memory and forgetting. Republicans who wanted Biden to be charged are similarly motivated to see the two issues as distinct, so that they can depict him as both criminal and senile. But the failing-memory issue was not extraneous to the evidence in this criminal matter; indeed, it was integral to Hur’s decision to not recommend indicting Biden. Hur concluded that the evidence is not sufficient to convict Biden in large part because of his memory.
The federal crime for which Biden was being investigated makes it a felony for a person who has “unauthorized possession” of a document “relating to the national defense” to “willfully retain” it. After Biden left the Vice-Presidency, in 2017, he was no longer authorized to possess classified documents. Hur found—and Biden has not disputed—that Biden did possess them, at his home and offices. The only open question in this investigation was whether his retention of the documents was “willful.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-impossible-role-of-robert-hur#:~:text=But%20the%20failing%2Dmemory%20issue,part%20because%20of%20his%20memory...
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Daily Comment
Why Robert Hur Called Biden an “Elderly Man with a Poor Memory”
In his first interview after the release of his controversial report, the former special counsel insists that it was not his job to write for the public.
By Jeannie Suk Gersen
March 22, 2024
Collage illustration of Robert Hur and Joe Biden
Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photographs from Getty
Save this story
When I first approached Robert Hur for an interview, soon after his appointment as special counsel, fourteen months ago, he demurred, saying, “I’m boring.” Then his circumstances changed. When we finally met, he pulled up in an armored black government S.U.V., accompanied by two U.S. marshals. Hur had completed his report on whether President Joe Biden had mishandled classified documents—he had declined to prosecute Biden but had impugned the President’s memory in the process—and members of both parties were furious. “I knew it was going to be unpleasant,” he told me this past week, “but the level of vitriol—it’s hard to know exactly how intense that’s going to be until the rotten fruit is being thrown at you.”
Hur’s report stated that his investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice-presidency when he was a private citizen.” Yet Hur concluded that “the evidence does not establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” He reasoned 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.” In Hur’s view, “it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
The report was designated confidential, but the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, had already promised to make as much as possible of it public. When he did so, on February 8th, Biden immediately held a press conference, which turned chaotic. Reporters yelled over each other, and Biden pushed back on Hur’s characterization of him, saying, “I’m well-meaning and I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing.” The President was particularly incensed by Hur’s claim that he did not recall what year his son Beau had died: “How in the hell dare he raise that.” Afterward, the White House continued to fight back, calling the references to the President’s memory “unnecessary, inflammatory, and prejudicial statements” that are “unsupported personal opinion criticism on uncharged conduct that is outside the Special Counsel’s expertise and remit.” (The Justice Department immediately defended Hur’s report as entirely consistent with legal requirements and Department policies.)
This past week, during a four-hour hearing in Congress, lawmakers from both political parties rebuked Hur. Republicans accused him of going easy on the President by not charging him despite the evidence of criminality; Democrats alleged that, because Hur could not indict the President, he had set out to hurt Biden politically. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, claimed that Hur had deliberately played “into the Republicans’ narrative that the President is unfit for office because he is senile.”
During his time as special counsel, Hur refused to speak to the press, but, shortly after he gave his congressional testimony, we sat down for a conversation, in which we spoke about his approach to prosecution, his commitment to the United States as the son of Korean immigrants, and why he took the special-counsel job. As we delved into how he wrote the report—and I shared some of my own concerns about his approach—it became clear to me that we were talking across something of a disconnect, between what the public needs from a special counsel and how a well-trained Justice Department prosecutor conceives of the role.
From the beginning, the investigation into President Biden has been double-edged: it was always about both Biden and Donald Trump. In September, 2022, after the F.B.I. found that Trump had taken boxes of classified documents from the White House and stored them at Mar-a-Lago, Biden called Trump’s conduct “totally irresponsible.” Two months later—shortly before the special counsel Jack Smith was appointed to investigate Trump’s alleged election interference and retention of classified documents—Biden’s lawyers alerted the government that boxes of materials from the Obama Administration had been found at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank where Biden spent time after his Vice-Presidency. The boxes contained some classified documents, and subsequent searches found more, at Biden’s Wilmington home and at the University of Delaware. In January, 2023, without informing the President, Garland appointed Robert Hur to investigate Biden’s retention of classified documents.
According to Justice Department regulations, a special counsel must be a lawyer selected from outside the federal government “with a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking” and “appropriate experience.” Hur was an obvious choice. At fifty-one, he had spent a total of fifteen years at the Justice Department, including roles as the top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—which involved work on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election—and as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland. Hur, a registered Republican, was nominated to the U.S. Attorney role by Trump (and confirmed unanimously by the Senate), but he insists that he does not have a partisan mind-set. “I’m just doing the work,” he told me. “I don’t have a particular ideology or crusade that I’m trying to go after.” When news broke of his appointment as special counsel, many of his friends, Democrats and Republicans alike, were supportive but said it was a little crazy to take such a thankless job. It was guaranteed that “this part of the country, or that part of the country,” he said, raising his arms to shape the two swaths, would be angry with him.
I asked Hur why he accepted the appointment. He explained that much of it had to do with his family’s history. His mother’s family fled from North Korea to South Korea shortly before the Korean War. Hur’s parents arrived in the U.S. in the early seventies, and he was born soon after. His father, now retired, was an anesthesiologist, and his mother, who trained as a nurse, managed her husband’s medical practice. “I know that my parents’ lives and my life would have been very, very different if it were not for this country and American soldiers in Korea during the Korean War,” Hur said. “There is a real debt that my family and I have to this country. And in my view, if you’re in a position where the Attorney General of the United States says there is a need for someone to do a particularly unpleasant task, if it’s something that you can do, ethically and consistent with your own moral compass, then you should do it.”
Hur grew up in the Los Angeles area, where he attended Harvard School for Boys (now a coed school called Harvard-Westlake). He recalled that the actor Tori Spelling was at the sister school: “There were lots of Hollywood people. I felt very much an outsider from all of that because of my strict Korean upbringing.” He explained, “It was quite stern. Excellence was expected. Fun was severely optional.” He played piano and violin. “I played drums, too, for a while,” he said, “because that was my form of rebellion.”
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Hur went to Harvard for college, where, he said, he was “regularly floored by how effortlessly classmates of mine could become fluent in things that took me quite a while to get on top of.” He continued, “I’ve never been the person whom people look at and say, ‘That person is a rare generational brain.’ But I’m going to work harder and grind it out.” He started out studying premed but was “weeded out” by a course in organic chemistry. He went on to study English, and wrote a thesis that was “an ethical analysis of William Faulkner’s ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ ” Hur traces his interest in literature to his high-school English teachers, who included the journalist Caitlin Flanagan. Flanagan remembers Hur, too—she recently chided him on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” saying, “As I taught Robert and so many students fortunate enough to benefit from my tutelage, when writing, the most important thing in an essay is we keep related ideas together.” She continued, to big laughs from the studio audience, “Robert, the assignment is ‘Should criminal charges be issued for this thing?,’ not ‘Can you give us an armchair neurological report of the man you’re investigating?’ ”
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Contrary to the stoic persona he displayed at the congressional hearing, Hur is lively and humorous in person. But I couldn’t help but connect his self-described fun-optional upbringing—and the unspoken pressures of being the first nonwhite person in this very prominent job—with his insistence that his work as a prosecutor is plodding and not creative. “I view it almost like an engineering task or a construction task. I am building a case,” he told me. “There are planks and nails and hammers. How does this thing get built with the requisite solidity and seaworthiness that it actually will hold up?” His goal, as special counsel, was to call as little attention to his work as he could. He resigned before his congressional testimony, he explained, simply because his predecessors had. “Look, if Mueller did it this way, then there must be some reasons,” Hur said. “I don’t want to make history here.”
Hur’s report was refreshingly blunt and direct, but it still led to misunderstandings. The White House and Democrats have managed to spin his conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to convict Biden as something separate from his observations about memory and forgetting. Republicans who wanted Biden to be charged are similarly motivated to see the two issues as distinct, so that they can depict him as both criminal and senile. But the failing-memory issue was not extraneous to the evidence in this criminal matter; indeed, it was integral to Hur’s decision to not recommend indicting Biden. Hur concluded that the evidence is not sufficient to convict Biden in large part because of his memory.
The federal crime for which Biden was being investigated makes it a felony for a person who has “unauthorized possession” of a document “relating to the national defense” to “willfully retain” it. After Biden left the Vice-Presidency, in 2017, he was no longer authorized to possess classified documents. Hur found—and Biden has not disputed—that Biden did possess them, at his home and offices. The only open question in this investigation was whether his retention of the documents was “willful.
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