If you want to blame someone for Biden's withdrawal from the race, lets start with AG Merrick Garland

Richard Schiff, who played White House communications director Toby Ziegler on “The West Wing,” told The Washington Post that the TV political drama’s creator Aaron Sorkin “could never have thought this one up. This is beyond what we were cable of imagining.”

He was referring to the unlikely scenario that followed President Joe Biden’s selfless decision to drop out of the presidential race and then endorse his Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination.

Biden was able to fulfill his pledge made in 2020 to be a “transition candidate” to a new generation of Democratic leaders. The party managed to avoid a potentially messy and divisive primary battle. And Harris has energized and united our big tent party behind her campaign. On the opening night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Biden will be closing the session with an emotion-packed passing of the torch to Harris.

But that hasn’t stopped Don-old Trump from hypocritically describing Harris’ rise to the top of the Democratic ticket as “unconstitutional” and accusing her of taking part in a “coup.” Trump and his allies have also claimed that Harris was “complicit” in a cover-up of  Biden’s mental fitness.

The mainstream media has also been pushing stories that Biden is upset with Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats for ushering him out the door. And some Democrats have expressed disdain for actor George Clooney and those Democratic lawmakers who urged Biden to quit the race after the July 27 debate debacle.

Let me state two things clearly. Although Biden is old and makes the occasional gaffe, he’s mentally fit and far more able than Trump to enter the Oval Office for a second term.

The chain of events that led to the debate began with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision in January 2023 to appoint Robert Hur as Special Counsel to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents from the Obama administration.

If you still want to blame anyone for Biden quitting the race, you can start with Garland. It wasn’t until Nov. 18, 2022, nearly halfway through Biden’s term, that Garland appointed Jack Smith as Special Counsel to investigate Trump, practically ensuring  that no federal cases would come to trial before the November election. His DOJ has not indicted a single member of Trump’s inner circle in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection, but has managed to convict Hunter Biden on a gun charge that usually is resolved with a plea deal.

Garland did not “weaponize” the Justice Department as Republicans like to claim; he effectively disarmed it. He was more focused on defending the DOJ as an institution than on defending democracy. He has been ineffective as attorney general and should resign. 

Now, much has been written about the events that followed the debate and resulted in Biden quitting the race. But there is a largely untold story regarding the events that led up to the debate.

It’s important to understand the mistakes that were made in order to avoid making the same mistakes again. What occurred was a repeat in a certain regard of some of the mistakes that led to Hillary Clinton’s narrow defeat in the 2016 presidential election.

In June 2016, former President Bill Clinton met privately with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch after boarding her plane at the Phoenix airport. That cast a shadow on the federal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Lynch then said she would accept whatever recommendations FBI director James Comey made about whether to bring charges in the case.

Comey announced in July 2016 that the FBI would not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton, but he did detail what he considered to be Clinton’s “extremely careless conduct” concerning her private use of the email server. Just 11 days before the election, Comey announced his decision to re-open the Clinton email investigation, which likely doomed Clinton’s candidacy.

And what we’ve seen ensue with Biden might be called Comey 2.0.

JAN. 12, 2023: GARLAND APPOINTS HUR AS SPECIAL COUNSEL IN BIDEN CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS CASE 

Garland’s announcement of Hur’s appointment described him as having had  “a long and distinguished career as a prosecutor.” He then gave a rather anodyne summation of Hur’s career.

But True North Research, a progressive watchdog  group, found that Hur’s superficial biography ignored “his deep Republican ties.” Hur clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist from 2002-2003. He has ties to The Federalist Society, including giving presentations at several events organized by the conservative legal group.

Shortly after Trump became president, Hur left a private law firm in April 2017 to work at the Department of Justice as the top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. This was right around the time that Rosenstein wrote a memo at Trump’s request to provide a rationale for firing Comey. In April 2018, Trump appointed Hur to be the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland.

After Biden became president, Hur went to work for the Gibson Dunn law firm as a partner in white-collar criminal defense. Other partners at the firm’s DC office include several influential right-wing lawyers such as Eugene Scalia, Ted Olson, Miguel Estrada and Michael D. Bopp, who is representing Harlan Crow in his fight against Senate investigations over his lavish gifts to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Incidentally, Trump’s favorite judge, Aileen Cannon worked for Gibson Dunn from 2009-2012 before becoming a federal prosecutor.

OCT 8-9. 2023: HUR INTERVIEWS BIDEN AT THE WHITE HOUSE AMIDST ISRAEL-GAZA CRISIS

And now we have to ask what the White House staff was doing in its response to the special counsel probe. Biden might still be running for president if he had responded to Hur the same way that Trump did to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s questions in his Russian collusion probe. Trump was allowed to submit written answers to Mueller’s questions. This would have been perfectly acceptable given Biden’s age and the fact that key issues regarding his handling of the classified documents date back to 2017.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel. On Oct. 8-9, Biden spent more than five hours answering questions from Hur. 

On the morning before the first session with Hur, Biden had spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the hostages taken by Hamas, American assistance to Israel and how to prevent the crisis from spiraling out of control, The Washington Post reported. The president had also made a round of calls to U.S. allies.

After the Tuesday session, Biden walked back to the Oval Office to meet with his national security team and call European leaders, the Post reported. He also called Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) who was in Israel, to check on his well-being and provide any assistance he needed.

The Post wrote:

Biden and his attorneys even discussed postponing the interview, but they ultimately decided against it. They had already blocked off two days on the president’s schedule and, with the investigation already dragging on much longer than anticipated, were eager to put it behind them. They never contemplated resisting Hur’s request for the interview, figuring Biden had little to hide and would benefit from being transparent, according to members of his legal team.

What if Biden had decided to postpone the interview rather than sit down to answer questions from the special counsel amidst one of the most serious international crises of his presidency? Would he still be in the presidential race?

FEB. 8, 2024: HUR ANNOUNCES BIDEN WILL NOT FACE ANY CHARGES, BUT SMEARS PRESIDENT OVER HIS MEMORY LAPSES

The key inflection point came on Feb. 8, 2024, when Hur announced that Biden would not be charged for his handling of some classified material after his term as vice president ended.

Up to this point, many voters had expressed concerns about Biden’s age and fitness to serve a second term, pointing to his occasional gaffes. But any such doubts were more than offset by Trump’s own frequent gaffes amidst rants that were unhinged, hateful and divorced from reality.

Hur’s report said the investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen." The report added that Biden's conduct "present[ed] serious risks to national security, given the vulnerability of extraordinarily sensitive information to loss or compromise to America's adversaries”

But what was even more damaging were Hur’s egregious remarks that his team had concluded that prosecutors had determined they would not be able to prove willful retention of classified documents beyond a reasonable doubt because Biden’s memory “was significantly limited.”

As CBS News described the report:

Prosecutors said it was possible that Mr. Biden would "present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." During his interview with Hur, the special counsel wrote that the president was confused about the timeline of events and was unable to ascertain questions about his time as vice president.

And even worse, Hur wrote that Biden could not remember important details of his own life: “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died," the report said.

In a letter to Hur, attached to the DOJ’s release of his report, the White House counsel’s office urged the special counsel to "revisit" and "revise" the descriptions of Biden's memory in the final report.

The letter noted that Hur did not mention in his report that that the “interview began the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel. In the lead up to the interview, the President was conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.”

Now Garland could have redacted these egregious and damaging remarks  from Hur’s report. After all, a federal judge found that Attorney General William Barr went to far greater lengths to put out a “distorted” and “misleading” account of Mueller’s report on his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Instead, in March 2024, Garland dismissed suggestions that he should have altered or redacted portions of Hur’s report. Garland said:

"The idea that an attorney general would edit or redact or censor the special counsel's explanation for why the special counsel reached the decision the special counsel did — that's absurd.”

Hur’s remarks about Biden not remembering when his son died struck a raw nerve in the president who is devoted to his family. Just hours after the report was released, Biden held a hastily arranged evening news conference.

And this turned out to be a major fail by the White House press office. Biden stood alone at a podium with no staff member to field questions shouted out by the White House press corps who weren’t seated but standing.

NBC News wrote that Biden forcefully defended himself. He was particularly upset about Hur’s remark that he couldn’t remember when Beau died.

“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden said, adding that when he was asked about Beau’s death during the probe, he thought to himself that it “wasn’t any of their damn business.”

Biden’s son Beau died in 2015 from brain cancer.

“I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away,” Biden said Thursday night, reiterating that he wears his late son’s rosary beads and honors him with a service every Memorial Day. The president often talks about Beau in speeches, especially in discussing loss and grief.

Biden also said, “My memory’s fine,” in response to a reporter’s question.

And then, after reading a response to Hur’s report, Biden made a gaffe in answering a question about the Israel-Hamas war. He mistakenly referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi as the president of Mexico. And that flub got lots of attention from the White House press corps.

The next day Vice President Harris delivered her own forceful response Hur’s report which she said was “clearly politically motivated.” She said: “As a former prosecutor, the comments made by that special prosecutor (were)  gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate.”

MAY 15, 2024:  BIDEN CAMPAIGN PROPOSES TO HOLD EARLY PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE; TRUMP AGREES

Like sharks sensing blood in the water, the House GOP caucus decided to use Hur’s report to bolster the Trump campaign’s claim that Biden was senile and unfit to serve as president.

On March 12, the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, held a tense hearing at which Hur defended his special counsel’s report, Hur said his assessment of Biden’s memory in the report was “necessary and accurate and fair.”

But the House GOP did not stop there. In April, Jordan and Rep. James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, threatened to hold Garland in contempt of Congress if he didn’t turn over the audio tape of Hur’s interview with Biden. Garland refused to comply.

And then with polls showing Biden trailing Trump, the Biden campaign made a surprise proposal on May 15 to move up the date of the first presidential debate to June 27. The Trump campaign almost immediately accepted an offer by CNN to host the debate.

The New York Times wrote:

The early-debate gambit from Mr. Biden amounted to a public acknowledgment that he is trailing in his re-election bid, and a bet that an accelerated debate timeline will force voters to tune back into politics and confront the possibility of Mr. Trump returning to power.

And Vox said that Biden’s team hopes that if the president “performs well, he could quiet voters’ concerns about his age and mental fitness.”

But the Biden campaign was overconfident. Alarm bells should have sounded when the Trump team agreed to every proposal for the debate format put forth by Biden’s campaign staff.

One big mistake was to schedule the first debate for the end of June — a month that saw the 81-year-old president make two exhausting trips to Europe — the first from June 5-9 during which Biden marked the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landing and also held meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and French President Emmanuel Macron, and the second from June 12-14 to attend the G7 summit in Italy.

Biden was also poorly prepared to deal with Trump’s gish gallop of lies. In the 2020 presidential debates, Biden had the advantage because he could attack Trump’s record in office, but this time the roles were reversed.

JUNE 27, 2024: BIDEN DEBATES TRUMP

We all know that the debate turned into a debacle for Biden. But it didn’t have to turn out that way.

One big mistake by the Biden campaign was its proposal that the candidates’ microphones be cut off when their allotted speaking time was up. A psychiatrist I know said this put Biden at a disadvantage because of his life-long stuttering problem and word-finding problems that come with aging. Thus his responses became rushed as he tried to answer the moderators’ questions as well as respond to Trump’s many lies.

Biden later attributed his poor debate performance in part to Trump’s constant shouting on stage even when his mic was turned off and Biden was speaking. Only the television audience couldn’t hear Trump being his obnoxious self.

Asked by ABC News reporter George Stephanopoulos when Biden realized he was “experiencing a bad night,” the president responded: “I knew I was having a bad night when i realized when he (Trump) had answered questions and they turned his mic off and he was still shouting i let it distract me."

You could ask why didn’t Biden’s debate team prepare a quick statement to open the debate with Biden acknowledging he had caught a cold that left him with a hoarse voice and cough. He could then have added that he had made two foreign trips earlier in the month — one to honor Americans who fell in World War I and II — whom Trump considers suckers and losers — and the second to meet  with G7 leaders to bolster Ukraine in its fight for freedom against Russia. And even though he was not feeling well, Biden could have said he felt the need to be here to call out Trump’s lies and threat to American democracy.

Biden’s poor debate performance left him in an untenable position in his bid for a second term.  In retrospect, it reflects better on the Democratic Party that there were those leaders like Pelosi who have deep respect and affection for Biden but still had the courage to urge him to make the right decision to withdraw his candidacy.

The Republicans are stuck with Don-old because their congressional leaders, former Rep. Kevin  McCarthy and Sen. Mitch McConnell, lacked the spine to stand up to Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The GOP is a party that’s based on fear and looking backwards; while Democrats are full of hope and looking forward.