Scrutable

Nikki Haley stayed in the race but has critiqued Trump only in the most passive terms — talking about how “chaos follows” Trump as if chaos were a homeless dog and Trump were an innocent tourist rather than a walking sausage wearing a bacon suit.

Grumble wrote: Fri Jan 26, 2024 9:45 pm $83.3m
Interesting number, I’m sure it’s worked out somehow.

Grumble wrote: Fri Jan 26, 2024 9:45 pm $83.3m
Interesting number, I’m sure it’s worked out somehow.

Stranger Mouse wrote: Tue Feb 06, 2024 3:43 pm DC appeals court rules that Trump does nit have criminal immunity for any offences committed while President

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap ... 3677.0.pdf

The special counsel investigating President Biden said in a report released on Thursday that he had decided “no criminal charges are warranted” against Mr. Biden over his handling of classified material after leaving the vice presidency in early 2017, but had found evidence that Mr. Biden had willfully retained and disclosed some sensitive material.

Robert K. Hur, the special counsel, said in his highly unflattering report that Mr. Biden had left the White House after his vice presidency with classified documents about Afghanistan and notebooks with handwritten entries “implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods” taken from internal White House briefings.

The report said that Mr. Biden had shared the content of the notebooks with a ghostwriter who helped him on his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad” even though he knew some of it was classified.

While Mr. Hur decided not to prosecute Mr. Biden, some of his reasons for doing so are likely to raise new questions about the president’s conduct and his mental state, portraying him as unable in interviews to remember key dates of his own vice presidency — and even precisely when his son Beau had died.

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Mr. Hur wrote.

It would be difficult to convince a jury after Mr. Biden left office that “a former president well into his 80s” was guilty of a felony that “requires a mental state of willfulness,” Mr. Hur added.

Biden’s memory lapse was a common theme throughout Hur’s report. He writes that Biden did not remember when he was vice president or, “even within several years,” when his son Beau died. Biden, Hur writes, “appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.” He predicted that Biden’s attorneys “would emphasize these limitations in his recall” if they were called upon to defend him at trial.