Editors at National Review Online take aim at another bad decision from President Biden.
Let’s not pretend there are exalted matters of principle at stake. President Biden’s assertion of executive privilege to block congressional access to his interview by special counsel Robert Hur is nothing more than election-year politics.
The president has many vulnerabilities, which is why his job-approval numbers are in the tank and current polling shows him slightly trailing Donald Trump, despite Trump’s similar disapproval numbers. Of these vulnerabilities, however, none stand out nearly as much as age and infirmity. Biden is 81 and deteriorating before the nation’s eyes even as he asks for a second term that — if he survives — would take him to age 86. Our many policy differences with him aside, he is simply not up to the world’s most important and grueling office.
That is why Biden has asserted executive privilege to keep the recording under wraps. Forget all the bombast about separation of powers, protecting the confidentiality of executive communications, and encouraging cooperation with intra-branch investigations. Forget the ever-pliant Attorney General Merrick Garland’s apparent willingness to take the fall — claiming, straight-faced, that some law-enforcement imperative demands sealing an embarrassing recording of his boss when Garland has already released the transcript.
Biden is withholding the recording of the interview for the same reason Republicans want it exposed: It would corroborate, in a painful way that no cold transcript could do justice, Hur’s conclusion that the president is failing mentally.
The mere transcript already shows that Biden has trouble remembering basic facts, keeping focused, and relating linear answers to straightforward questions. The transcript’s release was also humiliating for the White House. It put the lie to coordinated Democratic attacks on Hur, particularly the mindless rallying around Biden’s claim that the prosecutor had braced him with questions about his elder son’s death when it was Biden himself who brought up the subject — as he invariably does in tight spots.
