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b'The Daily is 100% reader-supported. Please consider becoming a subscriber to ensure that you never miss a podcast or a newsletter.Here we are, facing another Comey political hit job like the one he did on Hillary Clinton.Robert Hur\\u2019s Special Counsel report exonerated President Joe Biden on the classified documents case. But that\\u2019s not the headline. The press took the bait as if they learned nothing from 2016. The headline from folks like the AP was:This is a good time to point out that President Biden sat for this interview for two days, October 8th and 9th, as he was dealing with the international crisis of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th.This partisan hit job on President Joe Biden went so low as to attack him in a DOJ report for not recalling the date his son died, a matter that was wholly unrelated to the issue of classified documents and had no place in an official report given by someone who does not have any expertise in memory issues and was not called upon to give a report about anything other than classified documents.The report was issued by a Trump appointee and Trump supporter whom Merrick Garland appointed as special counsel over Biden for some unknown reason. This man even stated that Biden willfully took the documents and shared them, yet later in the report admits he has no proof of this.Is this a clown show? What is going on? Why wasn\\u2019t the report even looked at by Garland before being published?You might be wondering why Biden\\u2019s age is even being raised as a concern when his opponent is an adjudicated rapist found liable for fraud who faces 91 felony counts, including for acts against the United States, and is not only an authoritarian but also \\u201celderly\\u201d with memory problems.The point, or at least result, is to conflate Biden and Trump as similar, while glossing over Trump\\u2019s egregious criminal indictments, incompetency as president, two impeachments, sexual assault accusations including a jury finding him liable for rape, and worst of all his attack on this nation after he lost an election and the continued attempts to use lies about fraud to steal votes from over 81 million Americans.That is the story.The real story is how different these two men are, even though on the surface they are both white, older, and stumble when speaking.And even this requires context, because while both men forget names and dates, Trump speaks in second or third grade phrases; it\\u2019s not clear he has a grasp of nuanced policy on any matter, whereas Biden clearly does. Biden goes to work every day and does the job; Trump did not. Etc. Biden holds press conferences and takes questions he answers with comprehension of policy, even when he stumbles, which he does. The man has a stutter and he is older, but even younger politicians misspeak often enough that this shouldn\\u2019t even be raising eyebrows.As they were criticizing President Biden for his \\u201cmemory\\u201d issues, Sean Hannity couldn\\u2019t pronounce Angela Merkel\\u2019s name and Jesse Watters called Kristi Noem the Governor of South Carolina.Are they being fired?Speaker Johnson confused Israel with Iran on Meet the Press. Is his memory the topic of discussion? Why not?Just in passing, Trump forgot what year he was president during his time on the stand in a New York trial, as president he suggested Frederick Douglass was still alive and \\u2018being recognized more and more,\\u2019 he confused a photo of his rape victim for his ex-wife during a deposition, called Nikki Haley Nancy Pelosi repeatedly, thought he was running against Barack Obama, said Viktor Orban is the leader of Turkey, claimed voter ID is required to buy bread, had to be told where he was during a speech.There are three parts to this equation on how propaganda works: The DOJ, the Press, and You.DOJ:Former justice officials say Hur put his \\u201cthumb on the scale\\u201dFormer FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman on MSNBC: \\u201cUnfortunately we\\u2019re seeing a redux of what we saw with respect to James Comey at the FBI with respect to Hillary Clinton.\\u201d He also called the report " Entirely inappropriate, that\'s not the role of the Department of Justice\\u2026 It\'s gratuitous. It\'s what you\'re not supposed to do which is putting your thumb on the scale that could have political repercussions. Adjectives and adverbs, those have no place... stick to the facts.\\u201dNeal Katyal Former Acting U.S. Solicitor General : \\u201cMy first tour at the Justice Department, I wrote the special counsel regulations that give this special counsel Robert Hur his power. And at the end of it, we actually said that there shouldn\'t be a public report in general, that there shouldn\\u2019t be a kind of list of adjectives, to use Andrew\\u2019s phrase, that would occur.I\'m not aware of anything quite like this, in which you\\u2019ve got a special counsel going after the sitting president for being too old and having a faulty memory. That is, you know, he\'s come up with a clever way to get those adjectives in there by saying, well, if I brought this case to trial, this is what I would face from a jury.\\u201dFormer AG Eric Holder: \\u201cSpecial Counsel Hur report on Biden classified documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions. Had this report been been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised.\\u201dCNN Chief Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin: \\u201cIt was outrageous that Hur put in some of that stuff in this report. That had no place in it. There is no reason this report had to be 300 pages. There is no reason why this fairly straightforward case had to be treated this way. I mean this is just like what James Comey did to Hillary Clinton\\u2026The job of prosecutors is to put up or shut up. If you have a case, bring your case. If you don\'t have a case, shut the hell up.\\u201dDiscussion:Why exactly did Hur go beyond the point: \\u201cThe evidence does not establish Mr. Biden\\u2019s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt\\u201d? Instead, he began his op-ed into Biden\\u2019s mental state and memory in the future \\u2013 something that has zero relevance to the issue and read more like the Tumblr post of a confused teenager --in what can only be described as a political gift to Donald Trump.And Garland did not review or did review and allowed this completely unsupported opinion to remain, even though he was well aware that Hur\\u2019s bio was an advertisement of his potential political agenda.A commentator wrote me on X: \\u201cI investigate and write reports like this SC report for a living. I have never once deviated from the essential facts and conclusions to answer the question I am to address: Is there sufficient evidence to\\u2026\\u201dThis is the second Trump appointed Special Counsel he has appointed, perhaps in a mistaken and misguided effort to appear neutral to Republicans, who are never going to even care if someone is neutral.This frankly is the biggest weakness we have facing authoritarianism: A desire to be even-handed when the opposition is playing a death match and the belief that somehow only Republicans can be trusted to fairly judge a Democrat, but also only Republicans can be trusted to fairly judge a Republican president. Funny how that works.\\xa0Garland was a non-partisan, highly ethical institutionalist who would have made the perfect Supreme Court justice. His ethics alone would have changed the course of SCOTUS from what it has become.But we are fighting encroaching authoritarianism, and this requires a certain temperament and spine. Garland is a brilliant person with high integrity, but we can see how easily exploited is his excessive tendency toward congeniality and institutionalism.Not every person with integrity can be a warrior, though, and Garland is showing himself to be incapable of rising to this moment in history. On this matter, I continue my criticism of his appointment to Attorney General, and no, it won\\u2019t matter how much people yell at me about it. Press:The press feasted on the carcass of Biden\\u2019s grief and it was grotesque.Last night, the White House press corps attacked Biden in what can only be called a feeding frenzy of ambulance-chasing cheap tabloid tactics. They attacked Biden harder than they\\u2019ve ever come at Trump, who is facing 91 indictments and tried to overthrow the U.S. government to steal an election. They were so rabid career journalists expressed their disgust.This environment is certainly not about justice or fairness and way too much of the DC press is operating more as tabloid media than as political press. The people are going to have to insist on better by refusing to reward this tabloid orientation to political coverage.John Harwood:Biden\'s press conference showed the same thing his performance in office has shown for 3 years: he can do the job Mexico for Egypt meant nothing but the GOP political apparatus is a bad-faith enterprise and mainstream press has been knocked silly by financial/political pressureMatt McDermott:Four separate articles in the NYT today about Biden\\u2019s age today, including a *35 paragraph* front page article on a verbal gaffe.Trump\\u2019s own verbal gaffes are mentioned once, 21 paragraphs in, wherein we\\u2019re told they don\\u2019t matter because \\u201cvoters do not question his sharpness.\\u201dThis isn\\u2019t journalism, this is electioneering. And it isn\\u2019t reporting, it\\u2019s punditry. This is the press openly speculating on politics rather reporting on substance, quite literally calling balls and strikes on what they deem voters should and shouldn\\u2019t care about.\\u201dAnd Aaron Fritschner (DCoS/CD Rep. Don Beyer): Biden address'