Op-Ed: The Importance of Local journalism matters more now than ever before
By Emil Guillermo
Don’t worry about President Joe Biden’s age or memory.
Worry about how he has to confront ageism. Thanks to a certain Asian American special prosecutor named Robert Hur.
Hur went beyond and below the call of duty in political slander of the President.
Hur’s investigation concluded: there would be no prosecution against Biden for any mishandling of classified documents. So why wasn’t that the big headline last week?
Once it was determined there was not enough evidence to prosecute the president, Hur’s work was done.
Instead, Hur took a year to finish a nearly 400-page report that many mainstream news outlets have since mischaracterized. For example, CNBC’s headline quoted Hur: “Biden ‘willfully’ kept classified materials, had ‘poor memory’: Special counsel.”
Unfortunately, it’s misleading. By how much? On the Just Security website, two prominent law professors found Hur’s report actually described Biden’s statements as “innocent explanations.”
“Unrefuted innocent explanations,” say Prof. Andrew Weissmann and Prof. Ryan Goodman, doesn’t just mean the “case does not meet the standard for criminal prosecution — it means innocence.”
But no one walks away from the mainstream headlines about the report thinking Biden is innocent; Only that he “willfully” retained something classified, and he has a “poor memory.”
None of it adds up to a prosecution. Just a public persecution.
Is this the game being played by Hur, a Trump appointee to the Justice Department, who was named special prosecutor last year by Attorney General Merrick Garland?
Garland must have thought it was a stroke of genius to appoint a Trump Republican in a political year to investigate his Democratic boss. That would be a sign of unity in the fight for truth and justice, right?
It wasn’t.
Hur, the son of South Korean immigrants and a Harvard grad, has said all the right things in public statements: that he’d be “fair, impartial and dispassionate,” and would “follow the facts swiftly and thoroughly, without fear or favor.”
Right.
Or is that right-wing?
Hur’s speculative comments about Biden’s memory were challenged last Sunday by Biden’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer who witnessed Hur’s deposing of Biden.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Bauer called Hur’s report a “shabby piece of work,” that reached the right legal conclusion, but then was loaded with hundreds of pages of “misstatements of facts and totally inappropriate and pejorative comments that are unfounded and not supported by the record.”
Hur appears to have padded the report to buttress his own standing among Republicans. He makes memory a relevant issue when he uses it as an excuse to not prosecute Biden.
With no basis for a legal prosecution, Hur made sure to go for the political kill and let loose the virus that is ageism.
I once thought ageism would unite us all. We may not all be the same race, ethnicity, or gender, but we all fight time and the aging process.
But how naïve I was. Ageism can also inspire division, creating generation gaps, all charged with emotions that fuel a discrimination harder to fight than racism.
Of course, it cuts both ways. Last weekend, Donald Trump, 77, said Russia should be able to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO members who don’t meet their defense spending targets.
The man who wants to be president again is backing our enemy Putin against our allies.
Is that Trump showing off his anti-democracy bent or his senility?
That’s why ageism has become a dominant theme for both parties and is likely to hang around.
It won’t age well, unless we all know the truth about Hur’s misleading report.
The controversy has thrust Vice President Kamala Harris into the limelight, as she defended Biden and called Hur’s report “clearly politically motivated (and) gratuitous.”
Harris’ detractors have been sniping at her from day one with healthy doses of racism and sexism. Now, you can add ageism to the Republican tool set, a nasty political trifecta, as the GOP continues to hammer Biden and the Democrats with the misleading Hur report.
About the Author
Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. See him on YouTube.com/@emilamok1
