the uncommonly honest Robert Hur

Special Counsel Robert Hur (R) is the man who had been tasked with examining and cross-examining Joe Biden regarding questions of document mishandling and Biden's fitness to be charged with a crime. The Hur report concluded a jury would see Biden as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." This conclusion caused no small amount of fury among the left. Major left-wing newspapers lined up to defend Biden. The usual set of raving left-wing TV anchors insisted Biden was mentally coherent—certainly a lot sharper than that mandarin orange! Hur's evidence for his assessment, though, was clear and stark: Biden couldn't remember things such as when he'd been vice president, nor could he even remember when his son Beau had died. Wikipedia claims that Hur lied about the Beau Biden portion of the transcript, asserting that

The transcript of Hur's discussion with President Biden show Hur lied about President Biden not remembering the date of his [son's] death. The transcript [shows] President Biden remembered exactly the date unlike Hur's summary, etc. (emphasis added)

Keep in mind that Wikipedia is itself a tool of the left. Here's what the Hur-Biden transcript actually says:

[PRESIDENT BIDEN:] And so I hadn't, I hadn't, at this point -- even though I'm at Penn, I hadn't walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I'd be running for President. And, and so what was happening, though - what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th --

MS. COTTON: 2015.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Was it 2015 he had died?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: It was May of 2015.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: It was 2015.

MR. BAUER: Or I'm not sure the month, sir, but I think that was the year.

MR. KRICKBAUM: That's right, Mr. President. It - 

PRESIDENT BIDEN: And what's happened in the meantime is that as -- and Trump gets elected in November of 2017?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2016.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: '16.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: '16, 2016. All right. So - why do I have 2017 here?

MR. SISKEL: That's when you left office, January of 2017.

Basically, as you clearly see in the transcript, Biden hesitated on the year of his son's death, which got filled in by others. If you interpret date to mean, US-style, month-day-year, then Old Joe didn't know a crucial part of the date. Beau Biden died on May 30, 2015. Essentially, Wikipedia was edited by a partisan and now shows false information (i.e., that Hur had lied). Also note that the exchange shows Biden forgot Trump's election had been in 2016.

Rather than accept the truth of the report, the Democrats elected to grill Robert Hur, with wily Adam Schiff leading the effort. This didn't go well.

Congressional Democrats and their enablers in the Executive Branch haven't quite figured out that their totalitarian fantasies haven't yet come to reality. They are under the impression that they and their agitprop minions in the mainstream media can sell any manner of fiction to the American public. They've had a lot of success, to be sure, but they are still at least eight months away from getting their Soviet jollies.

It was this lack of a grasp on reality that led them to believe that they might be able to turn Special Counsel Robert Hur's Tuesday appearance on Capitol Hill to their advantage.

Democrats had basically two objectives on Tuesday: create the impression that the Hur report exonerated Joe Biden, and repair the damage done by his assessment of Joe Biden’s poor memory.

Well, they failed at both objectives. Special Counsel Hur explicitly said that his report was not an exoneration of Joe Biden. As for the issue of Joe Biden’s memory... they didn’t do any better. In fact, anyone who reads the transcript will see just how bad Biden’s memory was while he was answering questions. Is the average American going to read the transcript of Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur? Not a chance. So, what are the Democrats and their allies in the media going to do? Just make stuff up about what the transcript actually says.

It's true, they did make up a lot of stuff, but Hur was too good to let any of it stick. 

They wanted to be crafty about creating a false narrative, but they had Adam Schiff running point for the effort. Any time that Schiff isn't talking to a friendly, he embarrasses himself. He's too stupid to know that he's embarrassing himself, of course, so he never stops doing it. 

Over at Townhall, my colleague Madeline Leesman chronicles the exchange between Schiff and Hur. The gist of it is that Schiff takes extreme umbrage with the fact that Hur accurately described the Joe Biden that we all see every time he's on camera. Schiff rails against the "political" nature of Hur's conclusions, which is the mother of all projections. Throughout it all, Hur remains unflappable, while Schiff flails and gets increasingly condescending. 

From Madeline's post:

“You were not born yesterday; you understood exactly what you were doing,” Schiff continued.

“What you are suggesting is I shape, sanitize, omit portions of my reasoning and explanation to the attorney general for political reasons,” Hur responded before Schiff's time ran out. 

I don't know much about Robert Hur, but he seems to be a stalwart. Unfortunately, I think the pressure got to him, and he just retired from the Department of Justice, where justice only seems to happen when the Democrats aren't steering the ship.

A note about the original transcript of the DOJ interview with Biden: it's available online at any number of sources. If it was released by the DOJ, there's a big risk for the Democrats that anyone can dig into the script and find all sorts of damning information about Joe Biden and his eroded memory. In the small bit that I quoted above, we saw that Biden hesitated on the year of his son's death, and he got the year of Trump's election wrong. Supposedly, there's evidence that Biden was unsure of when he was vice president under Obama. What other treasures lie buried in the interview? I happen to have the Adobe Acrobat full suite, so when I downloaded the entire transcript PDF, I took the time to convert everything to searchable, optical character recognition text. With the power of the search tool now in my hands, I might do some digging of my own.

The Democrats were under the impression that everyone in the Department of Justice was a political tool to be used as they needed. Hur killed that vibe for them. That's the true source of the anger of Schiff and his colleagues. Oh, they're plenty mad about Hur's forthright description of the greatly diminished state of Biden's memory too. They need all the help that they can get selling him as fully functional to the electorate, after all. 

I'm not a fan of psychologizing, but this seems about right.