Crooked Media - What A Day: Hoisted by Hur own petard

- Ben Shapiro testing out an “Every American should work until they die” platform. Sounds like a winner!

DOJ Special Counsel Robert Hur was hauled into Congress on Tuesday to answer questions about the report he released last month summarizing his investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified documents. Congressional Democrats and Republicans are both mad about it, for very different reasons. 
 

• Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report investigating President Biden’s handling of sensitive government cleared Biden of committing any crimes in early February, but described his memory as faulty and unreliable. Democrats slammed the report as politically motivated, being that Hur is a Republican who held posts in disgraced former president Donald Trump’s Justice Department. (Merrick Garland, we’ll deal with you later!!!) As it turns out, the story as told by Hur in his report contained a few key omissions. 
   

• One such detail missed by the initial media cycle is that Hur conducted his interview with the president the day after the deadly October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks. It stands to reason that any president, even one decades Biden’s junior, would have been a little distracted. Nevertheless! The 258-page transcript of Hur’s interview with the president was provided to Congress and is now publicly available. The transcript shows a lighthearted President Biden, cracking jokes with prosecutors and making self-deprecating comments. 
   

• The blockbuster claim from Hur’s report was that President Biden could not remember when his son Beau had died “even within several years.” It turns out that this just wasn’t true. The president noted the precise day Beau died—May 30—but got the year wrong, initially indicating it was around 2018 before being corrected by an aide that the date was in 2015. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) asked Hur about this on Tuesday. Hur denied that Biden had accurately remembered the date, before Dean reminded him that the exchange was in the transcript. Tough luck!

Hur’s testimony before the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee was, uh, all over the place. But it painted a much more nuanced picture of Biden’s memory and cognitive ability than the report did. 
 

• Democratic members were, of course, upset by Hur’s characterization of the President’s memory, and Republicans were upset that he didn’t use his investigation to bring Biden up on any spurious criminal charges. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) pressed Hur on why he went to such lengths to malign the president if he had no intention of charging him with a crime. 
   

• Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a top Dem on the House Oversight Committee, was sitting in on the hearing, and noted to CNN that “Special counsel Hur was not named in order to investigate president Biden’s memory, and I don’t understand him to be a memory specialist.” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) noted that in the transcript, Hur told Biden during the interview: “You appear to have a photographic understanding and recall,” in a significant contradiction to the portrayal of Biden in Hur’s report. Swalwell also played a supercut montage of Trump’s verbal gaffes. The White House declared on Tuesday that the president was “cleared” in the investigation after Hur—who specifically did not recommend criminal charges against the president—for some reason insisted that he “did not exonerate Biden.” 

It may seem as though we’re splitting hairs at points here, but for someone as powerful as Hur to make misleading accusations (in an official DOJ report!) about the president’s mental acuity during an election year is a serious matter. And frankly, Biden has enough problems heading into November without Hur’s editorializations.

We can’t just sit here and watch this election cycle play out from LA. For one thing, all the sunshine makes it hard to read polls on our phones. That’s why Pod Save America is going back on the road! Jon, Jon, Tommy & Dan will be heading all over the country with Pod Save America Live: The Democracy or Else Tour. Come on out and bring your favorite undecided voter. Lovett or Leave It will also be on tour, in case that voter remains undecided and you think some gay chaos might help. Plus we’re offering a special ticket bundle that includes a signed copy of Jon, Jon & Tommy’s brand new book Democracy or Else! To get access to the best tickets, subscribe at crooked.com/friends and we’ll send you the presale code. See all the dates and learn more at crooked.com/events.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that Israel would press onward with its planned military campaign into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where roughly half of the enclave’s surviving population is currently sheltering. Netanyahu vowed to “finish the job” in Rafah as an international chorus of voices calling on Israel not to enter the city grows. President Biden reportedly said he will consider conditioning aid to Israel if the ground invasion moves forward, according to Politico, and on Tuesday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said that congressional action to block American arms sales to Israel is “certainly something that’s on the table.” Van Hollen, referring to an interview in which Biden said that crossing into Rafah is a “red line,”said that “if the president’s gonna say something’s a red line, it’s essential the president have an accountability structure.” He added that Netanyahu’s obstinance demonstrates why it’s “all the more important that if we’re going to mean what we say, it’s very important to have…accountability.” Van Hollen was one of seven Democratic senators who signed a new letter on Monday sent from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to Biden arguing that by continuing to arm Israel, he is breaching the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits sending military support to any nation that restricts the delivery of humanitarian aid. 

The United States will send a new military aid package to Ukraine worth about $300 million, the White House announced on Tuesday.

School hate crimes targeting LGBT students are on the rise, and they’ve increased the most over the past few years in states that have passed laws restricting LGBT student rights and education, where such crimes quadrupled, according to a Washington Post analysis of FBI data. It’s almost like when hatred is written into laws it makes people feel like they have license to commit hate crimes. 

John Barnett, the former Boeing quality control manager who became a whistleblower about the safety issues in the company’s commercial airplanes was found dead in Charleston, SC on Saturday. He had testified about his findings in a lawsuit against Boeing the day before. Rough look for Boeing!

President Biden met with leaders of the Teamsters Union on Tuesday, courting their crucial support ahead of November. 

After Trump’s hand-selected leadership team took over at the Republican National Committee on Friday (chair Michael Whatley and co-chair Laura Trump, Trump’s literal daughter-in-law) they fired 60 people at the RNC on Monday. 

Former precinct chairman for the Hays County, TX Republican Party Bo Michael Dresner was sentence to 410 years in prison after pleading guilty to multiple counts of child sexual abuse and more than 60 claims of posession of child sexual abuse images with the intent to promote. 

Congress is less productive than ever, passing far fewer laws each year than in decades past. Nobody wants to work anymore!

President Joe Biden officially clinched the Democratic presidential nomination after winning enough delegates in Georgia to put him over the top. Nice to see an underdog stage a come-from-behind win like this. 

Whether you’re searching for a buzzy new memoir, riveting true crime, or a fantasy novel that sweeps you away, Bookshop.org has just the book you’re looking for. Their online bookstore is stocked with a range of titles that will keep you entertained for hours. From Hanif Abdurraqib’s “There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension" to "Life Form" by Jenny Slate, there's something for everyone. Book recommendations on Bookshop.org also come from real people who love books, not algorithms.

And the best part? When you purchase from Bookshop.org, you’re supporting over 1,900 local, independent bookstores across the country. 

Bookshop.org is a certified B Corp, named “Best of the World” in Governance and they believe local bookstores are essential community hubs that foster culture, curiosity and a love of reading, and they’re committed to helping them survive and thrive. 

Happy reading!

A new Pew Research survey found that 74 percent of teens feel happy when they don’t have their smartphones. Something to think about!
 

Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) announced that he will not serve out the rest of his term, narrowing the House GOP majority even further.