At least Republicans have stopped “pouncing” in Axios’ world. For now, anyway.
Axios’ Alex Thompson offers up a “scoop” this morning that special counsel Robert Hur has begun preparing to testify before Congress. The nominal discussion will focus on his report on Joe Biden’s violations of 18 USC 793, but the real topic will be Biden’s competency. For some reason, however, Axios calls the House Judiciary Committee a “GOP panel”:
Ahem. The House Judiciary Committee has nineteen Democrats on the ‘panel.’ Republicans have 25, thanks to their razor-thin House majority, but this is hardly a “GOP panel.” Did Axios ever refer to the January 6 committee as a “Dem panel”? That select committee only had two Republicans on it, while the other seven members were Democrats. Did they ever refer to standing House committees as “Dem panels” when Nancy Pelosi was speaker, especially during the Russia-collusion hoax she spent two years pursuing?
And while House Republicans may not yet be “pouncing” again, now they’re “salivating”:
Special counsel Robert Hur is in final talks to publicly testify before Congress in early March about his report on President Biden‘s handling of classified documents, a GOP aide tells Axios.
Why it matters: House Republicans are salivating about the chance to ask Hur about Biden’s fitness for office.
I may give Thompson a pass on this one, although I again wonder whether Axios has ever described Democrats as “salivating” over their own House investigations. House Republicans clearly want to have this debate in the open now that Hur has revealed that Biden wears no cognitive clothes. Not only did Hur finally expose Biden, Biden then exposed himself in a disastrously incompetent display at the presser intended to rebut Hur. And as Karen just wrote, media outlets are now poking wide holes in Biden’s rebuttals. When you’ve lost NBC …
And worth noting about that, too: Biden apparently isn’t “with it” enough to recall what happened in the Hur interview. The White House climbed out on a limb just to have Biden saw it off:
- Joe Biden was infuriated by the report’s claim, telling reporters hours after the report was released: “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
- NBC News reported Wednesday that during Hur’s interviews: “It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden’s death.” Axios has not been able to independently verify the report.
- The White House hasn’t said whether Biden misremembered his son’s death by “several years,” as Hur wrote. Asked whether that part of Hur’s report was inaccurate, a White House spokesperson did not respond.
Given this situation, however, Congress has no choice but to investigate Biden’s competency and to ask Hur about his inclusion of it in the report. If a president has become incompetent to hold office, Congress has the constitutional responsibility to resolve it. They cannot just ignore a report from the Department of Justice that concludes that a sitting president is not competent enough to be prosecuted for willful violations of felony statutes, after all.
Besides, just how enthusiastic are House Republicans to have this fight? Biden has demonstrated a significant cognitive decline at least since taking office, if not on the 2020 campaign trail. If they were indeed “salivating” over the prospect of a debate over Biden’s compos mentis status, we can also ask why House Republicans never bothered to investigate it before now, even with all of the evidence piling up that Biden’s not able to execute the duties of the constitutional office he holds.
Maybe this is the slowest-motion “pounce” in history.
This looks more like House Republicans got forced into formally addressing this. That’s not to say they won’t run with it, but I don’t think “salivating” is accurate. In fact, it might be the Democrats on the Judiciary panel who salivate when Hur appears before their “GOP panel”:
A person close to Biden’s team told Axios: “As Hur mounts his campaign, there will be another story to tell — of Hur and his deputy being two aggressive political prosecutors from the Trump administration who decided to gun for Biden in an election year for their own political futures as Republicans.”
Hur’s mounting a campaign? Who knew? We can fairly assume that Hur didn’t beg to perform in the Judiciary circus. In fact, the most notable characteristic about Hur over the past year is that he did a disappearing act while conducting the investigation. Jack Smith kept his profile relatively low too, but comparatively speaking, Smith looks like Charo next to Hur. Did Hur even appear at all to take questions from reporters after filing his report? If he did, it went unnoticed.
Democrats look like they’re mounting a campaign, and Republicans will too, but it seems doubtful that anyone will “salivate” over it. The logical conclusion of a competency probe is President Kamala Harris — and neither side wants that.