[Make sure to read Joseph Klein’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded in his final report released on February 8^th that his year-long investigation into President Biden’s classified information issues had “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” On its face, this constitutes a violation of federal law regarding the mishandling of classified documents for which former President Donald Trump was charged. Nevertheless, Mr. Hur decided not to charge Joe Biden.

As the special counsel report noted, “The practice of retaining classified material in unsecured locations poses serious risks to national security, given the vulnerability of extraordinarily sensitive information to loss or compromise to America’s adversaries. The Department routinely highlights such risks when pursuing classified mishandling prosecutions.”

Joe Biden has been retaining classified materials, including some that were highly sensitive, which he had no business having in his personal possession in the first place, at unsecured locations for decades. But Special Counsel Hur, who was appointed by President Biden’s Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, is letting Mr. Biden get away with it. This is a glaring example of the double standard of justice that the Biden administration’s Justice Department regularly employs.

A principal reason that Mr. Hur gave for his decision to let Mr. Biden off the hook is the president’s feeble state of mind, which the special counsel believed would sway a sympathetic jury to acquit him.

Mr. Hur’s report stated that “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The report also noted Mr. Biden’s “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

To buttress the special counsel report’s observations about President Biden’s declining mental state, the report revealed that during his interview with the special counsel’s office last October President Biden was unclear when he served as vice president: “He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 -when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’).”

Biden apologists were fully aware of the political ammunition that Mr. Hur’s unflattering assessment of President Biden’s declining mental faculties would provide Republicans during this year’s presidential campaign. This assessment from the special counsel reinforced the concern that most voters already have about Mr. Biden’s continued fitness to serve as president for another four years.

Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden administration staffers, and the president’s White House and personal legal counsel all lashed out at what they alleged was Special Counsel Hur’s gratuitous mischaracterization of President Biden’s mental state. So did the enraged president himself at a hastily organized press briefing that he held a few hours following the release of the special counsel’s report.

“I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing,” the president said angrily. “I’ve been President. I put this country back on its feet. I don’t need his recommendation,” referring to Mr. Hur.

President Biden could not contain his rage at the report‘s mention that, during his interview with the special counsel’s office, the president “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” President Biden strongly condemned the special counsel for daring to question the president’s recollection of when his son died. He exclaimed that “when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business.”

Mr. Biden has a faulty recollection of what actually transpired during his interview with the special counsel’s office, as he does with many things. It was Mr. Biden himself, not the special counsel staff, who first raised the subject of his son Beau’s death. The president unwittingly demonstrated his memory problem again at the press conference by mistaking the president of Mexico for the president of Egypt when discussing opening Egypt’s border with Gaza. This is on top of Mr. Biden’s claim that he has recently spoken while president with French and German leaders who had died in 1996 and 2017, respectively.

President Biden tried during his press conference to have it both ways in discussing the Hur report. He strongly condemned Special Counsel Hur for calling his mental faculties into question. However, the president was very pleased that Mr. Hur distinguished between how Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump handled the return of classified information that they each had improperly retained in their possession.

“I was especially pleased to see special counsel make clear the stark distinction and difference between this case and Mr. Trump’s case,” President Biden told reporters. “The special counsel wrote, and I quote, ‘Several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear. Most notably, after given multiple chances to return classified documents to avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months. He also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice; consented to the search of multiple locations, including his home; sat for a voluntary interview; and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.’”

Troves of classified documents just happened to follow Joe Biden after the end of his vice presidency to his unsecured Delaware garage and other unsecured locations. He blamed his staff for neglecting to carefully examine materials they were gathering from the then-vice president’s office and official residence for packing before sending them in boxes to his private residences or offices.

It strains credibility that Mr. Biden had no idea what the boxes strewn about in his garage for years next to his precious Corvette might have contained or that he was not at all curious to find out. President Biden started “cooperating” with authorities in identifying what classified documents might be in his possession and returning them to the National Archives only after the discovery of classified information in former President Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. This was nothing more than a calculated political decision by President Biden to make himself look good as compared to Mr. Trump.

Putting aside whether Joe Biden knew there was confidential information from his vice president days lying around at his two residences and private offices, Mr. Biden cannot use that excuse to justify what he did while serving as a U.S. senator. He allegedly acted improperly by taking away some classified documents that were only supposed to be viewed in a secure room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) and unlawfully retaining them for decades at unsecured locations. Joe Biden was fully cognizant of what he was doing while in the prime of his life during his Senate days.

Moreover, agents found boxes or folders in a storage closet in Mr. Biden’s garage that contained documents with classification markings dating back to the 1970s and 1980s that related to foreign trips Mr. Biden took as a senator.

Joe Biden had no business taking and retaining for his own personal use any classified documents that he gained access to while serving in the Senate. Yet Special Counsel Hur glossed over this gross violation of the law arising from his willful mishandling of such classified information.

President Biden should thank Mr. Hur for the free get out of jail card that the special counsel handed him, primarily because of the president’s sharply declining mental condition. But voters have every reason to ask why an elderly man with such a poor memory is too mentally feeble to stand trial for alleged criminal misconduct but is still running for reelection as president of the United States.