'Got the law wrong': Dershowitz says Biden's 'cognitive skills' meet requirement for charges

Joe Biden meets with senior advisers for a daily press briefing, Thursday, Jan. 20, 2022, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House photo by Adam Schultz)

By Jason Cohen
Daily Caller News Foundation

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz asserted Monday that President Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities are sufficient to face charges for taking classified documents.

Special counsel Robert Hur found Biden “willfully” held onto classified documents but he did not bring charges because the president presented himself as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” during their interviews. However, Hur was legally incorrect for not bringing charges on this basis as it does not require a particularly powerful memory or cognitive aptitude to commit the crime of taking classified documents, Dershowitz told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.

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“The report itself is a disaster on both respects,” Dershowitz said. “It was unfair to both sides. First they got the law wrong. The kind of cognitive skills you need to be able to commit this crime are minimum cognitive skills. All Biden had to know is that he possessed classified material and he had no right to possess it. You don’t need a deep memory to do that. So he was just wrong about the law.”

Documents spanning Biden’s long political career were found in Biden’s garage and at the Penn Biden Center.

“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. These materials included (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” Hur wrote.

It would be “difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” Hur asserted.

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Biden’s allies have scrambled to defend his mental faculties after Hur’s Thursday report and a press conference where the president made numerous gaffes, including confusing the presidents of Mexico and Egypt.

However, Hur was incorrect to make that call as well, Dershowitz told Bartiromo.

“He was also wrong about how trials are conducted. How would the jury find out about Biden’s bad memory? Biden would have to introduce it. As a trial lawyer, I would never have introduced that as defense in this case so Hur was wrong. Hur was also wrong in going as far as he went, in trying to do a medical diagnosis of somebody he hadn’t examined medically or hadn’t been examined medically,” Dershowitz said.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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