{"id":99938,"date":"2024-02-09T23:08:10","date_gmt":"2024-02-10T05:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=99938"},"modified":"2024-02-09T23:08:10","modified_gmt":"2024-02-10T05:08:10","slug":"99938","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=99938","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

A Simple Moment of Weakness<\/a>
\nReconnecting with History\u2014Special Installment<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/strong>The President\u2019s job\u2014and if someone sufficiently vain and stupid enough is picked he won\u2019t realize this\u2014is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em>\u2014Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy<\/p>\n

My phone buzzed early in the evening. A message from one of my paid subscribers telling me about an impending press conference by one of my least favorite subspecies of humanity: a politician. She requested that I watch the conference and give my take on the potential historical significance of the event and\/or share some history that might inform her understanding of the event.<\/p>\n

This is not my idea of a \u201cgood time.\u201d I would literally rather explain the evolution of torture techniques during the Spanish Inquisition\u2014that, at least, would have a flavor of the lurid to leaven the horror on display.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, I allowed myself to be convinced. I need to keep my paid supporters happy (and yes, if you\u2019re a paid supporter, I will pay attention to your requests for topics\u2014I may not always fulfill them the next day, but they will go into the hopper. I\u2019m an honest intellectual whore: I know how to sing for my supper). Besides, the event in question turned out to be a lot more important than I was hoping it would be. So here we go.<\/p>\n

The Immediate Context<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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To get us all on the same page, here\u2019s the skinny:<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

During his years as Vice President, Joe Biden appropriated a bunch of classified documents, some of which wound up in file boxes in his garage. On the face of it, this seems an even more egregious a violation of the official documents handling laws than did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u2019s email server (a matter on which the DOJ declined prosecution) and former President Donald Trump\u2019s stockpiling of maybe-declassified-then-reclassified-but-maybe-not documents in his part-time residence at Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida (for which he is currently being prosecuted).<\/p>\n

The special prosecutor\u2019s report on the Biden matter dropped today.\u00a0You can read it here<\/a>. You can read a\u00a0Twitter thread digesting it here<\/a>\u00a0(warning: partisan account).<\/p>\n

Tucked among the pages were an implied justification for declining to prosecute (the administration cooperated with the investigation, and without obstruction charges in the mix the rest becomes harder to prosecute) and a startling explicit justification: President Biden, the most powerful man on the planet,\u00a0is incompetent to stand trial<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Relevant excerpt from the prosecutor\u2019s report<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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Another relevant excerpt<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Biden held a press conference in response:<\/p>\n

It did not go well.<\/p>\n

You can watch it for yourself here:<\/p>\n

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