As all hell continues to break loose around Joe Biden after the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s devastating report on Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) says Attorney General Merrick Garland is at a crossroads due to Hur’s decision not to charge Biden with mishandling classified documents.
Hawley, a former attorney general of Missouri, told Fox Digital he believes Garland has only two options under the U.S. Constitution.
I’m calling on [Garland] publicly now to do what I think is required under the law in the Constitution … either charge the president, or he will go to the cabinet and tell them, ‘I believe we have to invoke the 25th Amendment.’ He’s got to do one or the other.
If he doesn’t, it will just confirm what everybody thinks, which is that there are two tiers of justice and that Garland himself is completely complicit in the corruption of this administration.
With all due respect, Senator, Merrick Garland is the hood ornament of the two-tier justice system.
But to Hawley’s larger point, the Hur investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents found that he “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” but nevertheless, the report indicated that Biden wouldn’t be charged.
And here’s the part principally responsible for all hell breaking loose:
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. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. 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.
So, yes: Hur concluded that Biden willfully committed a crime. But, no: Biden won’t be charged in part because he’s a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
What a complete crock of crap, which Hawley believes, as well:
He [Hur] concluded that the elements of a crime were present, namely that the president had willfully retained and disclosed classified information, so he knew it. I mean, the report makes it very clear he knew that it was classified information, this was done over years and decades — not just a couple of months — and he willfully did it.
But he ultimately recommends against prosecution, not because he didn’t do it, but because, basically, Biden is mentally unfit to be prosecuted. Because he doesn’t think that he can get a jury to ultimately convict, because the president is so mentally unstable.
Hawley simplified it:
It can’t be … ‘He’s totally fit to continue in office, but we’re not going to prosecute him.’ I mean, that’s just — that would be the most brazen miscarriage of justice and degradation of the rule of law.
Senator, we’re talking about Merrick Garland here. Look up “brazen miscarriage of justice and degradation of the rule of law,” and you’ll probably see his picture.
Incidentally, Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) sent a letter to Garland on Thursday night in which she also called on the attorney general to take action.
[If Biden’s not] mentally competent to stand trial, then he most seemingly lacks the ability to execute his presidential responsibilities. So it is incumbent upon you to explore proceedings to remove the President pursuant to the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution. President Biden needs to be charged, or he needs to be removed. There is no middle ground.”
Garland will do zero.
The Bottom Line
Alarming as it might be — as was the entire report and Joe Biden’s disastrous press conference on Thursday night, Merrick Garland couldn’t care less about the demands of Josh Hawley, Claudia Tenney, or any other Republican. Team Biden — including the president — has brazenly ignored the law for more than three years on multiple fronts.
That will not change.