Citizen Joe

Biden's presidency as an American cultural masterpiece.

It turns out, we are living in a real-life reenactment of Citizen Kane.

As always several days behind on whatever the current big story is, it was my intention — finally sitting down to browse the Biden classified documents report — to serve the reader some comments on the renewed display of the confusion between claims and reality that defines modern intellectual thought and discourse.

I will still structure this post as such a commentary, but merely because it allows for progression to the conclusion above. After all, Citizen Kane starts at the end as well.

Claims are not reality

Once again, “the discourse” has revealed that the products of modern American university education — the Professional Managerial Class, and the media — can not mentally parse a distinction between claims about reality and reality itself.

The intellect of the current American President, Joe Biden, has been visibly sluggish and decrepit for four years, and the man himself has been so shy of the camera as to suggest that what the public does see of his intellect is only its fleeting best moments, possibly assisted by expensive chemical therapies. This is all on Youtube, all available to the naked eye and lazy inference. From March, 2021:

Yet the American intellectual, the media elite, must wait three full years, until at last the claim of Biden’s mental decay is made, in order to have a full meltdown crisis over the fact that Biden is in mental decay. From a conversation between two New York Times columnists:

But Hur’s report helped confirm what many of us watching the president have long feared: He’s lost more than just a step.

But Hur’s report obviously didn’t substantially add to previously available visual evidence. Everyone could already see Biden’s decline for themselves. What has really changed is that on Wednesday of last week, Biden’s decline was not a story, and on Thursday, it was a story. Hur’s report generated the conditions which precipitated a reaction in the crowd, rendering a particular topic “important” in the eyes of the crowd; in turn, anyone discussing the topic could imperil a specific individual with permanent, cemented crowd disapproval — outsider status. This is fine; it just feels patronizing to hear anyone tell me that this is all because something has suddenly been “confirmed.”¹

No, some claims were simply made. Claims are not reality — and the reality in question was already visible and obvious. When Biden, accused of forgetting the year his son Beau died, mounted the podium afterward to scold reporters that he still wears daily “the rosary he got from Our Lady of” Guadaloop, but without being able to remember the last word, it was only different from all his other televised lapses in its ironic timing and seedy poignance.

Clearly, Biden forgets things — he cannot get on stage to prove the absurdity of questioning his memory of his son’s death without revealing the opposite. Yet overall, the Biden on the screen that day (and afterward) was (and has been) exactly the same as the Biden on screen every other day since 2020. He is like a sharp mind being broadcast remotely into a receiver with constant, periodic shut-offs and scrambled transmissions (“president Sisi of Mexico”). (Again, I expect that this is him at his daily best; who knows what he is like when he isn’t permitted to be observed.)

The context of Hur’s description of Biden’s memory

Now, consider that Hur’s report is hardly as damning as has been portrayed regarding Biden’s memory (though the matter of his guilt has been underplayed).

In the summary of the report (pdf), Biden’s likely perception by the jurors is cited as a factor influencing the decision not to bring charges. On the matter of Biden’s nearly certain intentional keeping of classified material regarding the 2009 Afghanistan surge, it is claimed that the jurors would likely find reasonable doubt due to Biden’s presentation as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” based on the investigators’ direct interactions with the man during a 5 hour interview last year.

This is a combination of banal, implausible, and oversimplified. Of course jurors would find Biden’s age sympathetic and have reasons to suspect lapses in memory. Given that it would in fact be in Biden’s interest to appear as inept as possible, citing “direct observations” is a legalistic formality best understood in the context of justifying the conclusion not to bring charges. The hypothetical “forgetful elderly man” who gets on the stand could be a total act anyway. At the same time, Biden’s megalomania and temper could just as plausibly cause the opposite effect — he might do everything possible to camouflage gaps in memory, and the haughty, hostile response to perceived slights to which he is prone might easily repulse jurors.

The point is that the reader should not give the statements in the summary too much credit; an agenda is being pursued (to appear bound by the material of the investigation to not bringing charges), and some nuances are being discarded in the service of this agenda.

The problem of Biden’s lie to special counsel

More substantive material appears on page 206. The most important point is that in last year’s interview with the special counsel office, Biden denies precisely the thing that the investigators come to conclude he has probably done:

As Mr. Biden said in his interview with our office, if he had found marked classified documents after the vice presidency, “I would have gotten rid of them. I would have gotten them back to their source… I had no purpose for them, and I think it would be inappropriate for me to keep clearly classified documents.”

p 206

Whereas, the investigators find that in 2017 1) Biden left office likely aware that his personal trove of work-related documents had not been processed in any way by staff for the retrieval of classified material, 2) He was likely still in deliberate possession of documents related to the 2009 Afghanistan surge, for the purpose of preserving evidence related to his objections to the same surge, a point of pride which he felt would burnish his reputation in history, and 3) He told his ghostwriter on tape in February, while discussing his 2009 Afghanistan objection, that he “just found all the classified stuff downstairs [possibly meaning his basement office].”

“So this was — I, early on, in ’09 — I just found all the classified stuff downstairs — I wrote the President a handwritten 40-page memorandum arguing against deploying additional troops to Iraq — I mean, to Afghanistan — on the grounds that it wouldn’t matter, that the day we left would be like the day before we arrived. And I made the same argument… I wrote that piece 11 or 12 years ago.”²

p 109

For the purposes of discussing whether to prosecute Biden for still having a box with the Afghanistan memo and related material in late 2022 — this almost certainly being the same “classified stuff” he found in February, 2017 — Biden’s claim in the 2023 interview adds the problem of deciding whether he has lied intentionally or by false recall. He obviously “found marked classified documents after the vice presidency,” didn’t get “rid of them,” did have a “purpose for them,” and did think it was appropriate for him “to keep clearly classified documents.”

The importance of the Afghanistan “classified stuff”

Before continuing to consider whether Biden really believed he did not retain any classified material in 2023, we may gain some idea of the “scale of forgetting” that such a belief would require. Just how important was the Afghanistan memo?

The investigators write in their summary:

In 2009, then-Vice President Biden strongly opposed the military’s plans to send more troops to Afghanistan. U.S. policy in Afghanistan was deeply important to Mr. Biden, and he labored to dissuade President Obama from escalating America’s involvement there and repeating what Mr. Biden believed was a mistake akin to Vietnam. Despite Mr. Biden’s advice, President Obama ordered a surge of additional U.S. troops, and Mr. Biden’s views endured sharp criticism from others within and outside of the administration. But he always believed history would prove him right. He retained materials documenting his opposition to the troop surge, including a classified handwritten memo he sent President Obama over the 2009 Thanksgiving holiday, and related marked classified documents. FBI agents recovered these materials from Mr. Biden’s Delaware garage and home office in December 2022 and January 2023.

p 2

To support this conclusion regarding the motivation for retaining the Afghanistan documents, the investigators later offer a quote from his notebook entry following a meeting in fall, 2009:

If I succeed in slowing down or stopping this misguided (policy) buildup it will make taking this job worthwhile.

This decision will define our Admin in history — hanging out there alone is worth it. I don’t want history to associate me with the adoption of a [surge].

p 120

And they remark:

In the years since the 2009 surge, including when Mr. Biden, as president, decided to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021, he has invoked his Thanksgiving memo and claimed that history has confirmed his good judgment.

p 125

Biden’s retention of these materials becomes a violation of the law after January, 2017; this is why the Afghanistan material is more problematic than the other troves of classified documents or information kept in unsecured storage at his properties for five decades, many of which have likely been photographed by agents from all walks of the Earth. Biden clearly knew he still had “classified stuff” related to his 2009 Afghanistan memo in February, 2017, when being interviewed by his ghostwriter. Whereas, for other material, either there is no positive evidence that Biden was aware he was in possession of the same, or classified information was kept in the form of handwritten notes, a violation of the law which has not traditionally been subject to penalty or even enforcement (no action was ever taken to retrieve Reagan’s notes before his death).

Back to Biden’s memory: Interview descriptions

Thus on the question of whether Biden is lying or experiencing false recall, the interpretation which the investigators recommend to the reader is that after February, 2017, Biden ceases to remember that he has the “classified stuff.”³ And this itself, if true, would mean that Biden’s claim of innocence represents a remarkable lapse in memory, and thus the falseness of the claim supports the material of the claim: Biden was simply too absent-minded to intentionally retain documents after 2017.

Supporting this recommendation, the investigators write:

Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.

In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. 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?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.

In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall.

Lastly the investigators remark on the discarded placement of the Afghanistan documents box within the garage — we will come to this in just a moment.

Is that so bad?

But as for the above “evidence” of Biden’s memory issues, again, the reader must understand that this is all motivated by justifying the decision not to bring charges. At the same time, therefore, one can take a hostile approach to the evidence.

Biden was not sharp in his conversation with a ghostwriter in 2017 — so what? Maybe he wasn’t in fact enthusiastic about the premise — “Let’s write a book about how my son’s death dissuaded me from running for President, and made it hard to round out my final years of service in a failed Presidency that has just been rebuked by a populist rout, and will go down in history as a footnote to who knows what dark future.” Shoot me now. And reading from notes is often a struggle — one does not know where exactly relevant material is located on the page.⁴

Likewise, who doesn’t often have to pause to remember precisely the years that begin and divide the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations? In 2009, is Biden still vice-president? In 2012, is it Gates or Trayvon or Brown? In 2014, which iPad is current? In 2015, are men women yet? In 2016, is it a Yemen year or a Ukraine year or both? In 2018, who is Taylor Swift dating? In 2019, is it a preschool or a synagogue or a gay nightclub? The last 15 years have been an era of profound stasis in culture, technology, and politics. Years do not pass, but merely repeat themselves with different labels on the calendar. It simply isn’t prima facie remarkable to have to struggle to remember The Chronicles of Biden; and besides this, any individual’s own work history, or even the precise date of the loss of family. It’s all happening at the same time.

Again, this is to take a deliberately hostile approach to the complaints which the investigators offer to support their decision not to bring charges. The reality of Biden’s memory is clearly not misaligned with the possibility that he no longer remembered having the Afghanistan material.

The tragic state of the Afghanistan box

This leads us to the observation which does, in fact, support the conclusion that Biden had totally forgotten about the Afghanistan box, and at the same time puts his entire career into tragic relief.

The passage describing the location of the box reads like some genius work of fiction — a specific work, in fact. It evokes the final scene of Citizen Kane.

Like Welles’ Charles Foster Kane, Biden begins his life as a political wunderkind thwarted by a scandal. Like Kane, Biden loses a wife and child in a car crash. Like Kane, Biden forever ceases to be relatable to the common man, and eventually is driven only by megalomania. Like Kane, Biden’s late life is a poor substitute for the promise of his youth — he has attained the Presidency, but it is a Presidency which has been deflowered and stripped of prestige by Obama, Hillary, and Trump; he is only allowed it because his country cannot produce another electable white male besides Trump; and he must have it stolen for him it anyway. Biden’s White House, with minstrel show Christmas dancers prowling the hallways, is like Kane’s Xanadu — a detached fiction of his prior dream.

Along the way to this hollow substitute for his 1988 ambitions, his previous achievements become effaced, leaving him with nothing to show for his entire career. The only constant between the era before Trump’s election and afterward is Hunter and Ukraine — everything else from before is meaningless today.

So much so, that the moment which in 2009 Biden believed would vindicate him to history — the moment which he deliberately sought to record by retaining classified documents in a specific box, and still recalled as important in 2017 — has become so trivial that he doesn’t even remember having the box. It sits in his Delaware garage lost to time.

We also expect many jurors to be struck by the place where the Afghanistan documents were ultimately found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.⁵

p 208

Biden will evade legal penalty for willfully retaining classified material because the motivation for doing so — preserving the record of something he did that mattered — became forgotten for much the same reason the year of his son’s death did.

Nothing in his life has made any difference.⁶ It has all already been tossed in the furnace of history, like Kane’s sled.

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1. Note a bit of self-awareness in the quoted example: “Helped confirm.” This is to say, it is understood by Bret Stephens at least on a subconscious level that nothing has really changed due to this report, everyone is just pretending as if this is so.

2. It would have been just over 7 years.

3. They further propose that although the evidence supports the conclusion that Biden knew his retention of the Afghanistan memo was not going to “remedy itself” after February, it doesn’t rule out the opposite conclusion, once again creating room for reasonable doubt. In particular, they argue that in February of 2017 it may not have struck Biden as having been remarkable or memorable that a box full of classified documents was in his basement office.

4. The question becomes whether Biden’s performance was unusually slow given whatever he was doing at the moment, as for example when reading verbatim from the notebooks for “hours.” The reader has no way to assess whether the report’s judgement is appropriate.

5. Were Biden a fictional character:

1. “near a collapsed dog crate” — metaphor for his dead son and daughter

2. “a dog bed” — his profligate living son, Hunter

3. “a Zappos box” — tacky, pretender luxury, reflecting the material poverty of our modern elites

4. “an empty bucket” — death

5. “a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape” — false revelation, broken intellect

6. “potting soil” — death

7. “and synthetic firewood” — artificial passion; also death

6. Besides, probably, leading to substantial risk-free access of classified material by foreign agents over many decades.