Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz asserted Monday that President Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities are sufficient to face charges for taking classified documents.
Special counsel Robert Hur found Biden “willfully” held onto classified documents but he did not bring charges because the president presented himself as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” during their interviews. However, Hur was legally incorrect for not bringing charges on this basis as it does not require a particularly powerful memory or cognitive aptitude to commit the crime of taking classified documents, Dershowitz told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. (RELATED: ‘It Practically Screams’: Calls To Invoke The 25th Erupt After Hur’s Damning Biden Report)
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“The report itself is a disaster on both respects,” Dershowitz said. “It was unfair to both sides. First they got the law wrong. The kind of cognitive skills you need to be able to commit this crime are minimal cognitive skills. All Biden had to know is that he did possess classified material and he had no right to possess it. You don’t need a deep memory to do that. So he was just wrong about the law.”
Documents spanning Biden’s long political career were found in Biden’s garage and at the Penn Biden Center. (RELATED: Joe Biden Kept Classified Ukraine Information From Time Period When Hunter Biden Sat On Burisma’s Board)
“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. These materials included (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” Hur wrote.
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,” Hur asserted.
Biden’s allies have scrambled to defend his mental faculties after Hur’s Thursday report and a press conference where the president made numerous gaffes, including confusing the presidents of Mexico and Egypt. (RELATED: ‘Absolutely Lucid’: John Fetterman Says He’s Never Once Seen Biden Suffer From Cognitive Difficulties)
However, Hur was incorrect to make that call as well, Dershowitz told Bartiromo.
“He was also wrong about how trials are conducted. How would the jury find out about Biden’s bad memory? Biden would have to introduce it. As a trial lawyer, I would never have introduced that as a defense in this case, so Hur was wrong. Hur was also wrong in going as far as he went, in trying to do a medical diagnosis of somebody he hadn’t examined medically or hadn’t been examined medically,” Dershowitz said.
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