Wall Street Journal article about Biden. "Mr. Biden's widening memory lapses"

Wall Street Journal

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Joe Biden May Want to Forget About the Russia Investigation

The candidate struggles to field softballs from friendly media. What if he were asked real questions?

By Gerard Baker

July 27, 2020

As was perhaps predictable in a presidential contest between two men on the ripe side of 70, we’re into the “my memory is better than yours” phase of the election campaign.

Neurologists are divided on the real value of cognitive testing, but in any case we should be less interested in whether someone can recite with precision a string of random words than in whether he can demonstrate practical recall of recent important events in his life.

A better test for Joe Biden right now than “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV” might be “Obama. Vice president. Russia. Trump. Investigation.”

It’s well past time Mr. Biden was asked some hard questions about what he knew about the campaign by the administration he worked in to paint Mr. Trump as an asset of Russian intelligence.

When he digitally tiptoes out from his Delaware fastness, the former vice president is typically tossed some gentle softballs from friends at MSNBC, CNN or some other group of Democratic Party activists.

Even these can take a curious course. Last week, in a free-associative online session with representatives of the Service Employees International Union, Mr. Biden warned that the president was inciting hatred of Koreans by attacking China for covering up Covid-19. “People don’t make a distinction—as you well know—from a South Korean and someone from Beijing,” he told a panel that included a couple of puzzled Asian-Americans. They nodded sympathetically, like concerned relatives at the bedside of an elderly family member ranting about the nurse who has taken away his record player.

Mr. Biden can speak knowledgeably on the topic of Asian stereotypes. In 2006, when he was cognitively sharper, he offered this socioeconomic gem: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”

Mr. Biden is lucky he doesn’t receive tough questions—about the Russia-collusion story, for instance. Having spent three years talking about little else, the media has now pushed the story down the memory hole, since it was widely discredited and failed to generate its intended outcome, the removal of the president.

Inconveniently for the former vice president, awkward reminders keep popping back up unexpectedly, like the verbal eructations that punctuate Mr. Biden’s remarks.

The latest information adds to the mound of evidence that there was serious malfeasance by officials inside the Obama administration. Here’s what we’ve learned in the past couple of weeks alone:

• At an August 2016 intelligence briefing, given for the ostensible purpose of informing candidate Trump about Russian interference in the election, an FBI official was present to gather intelligence on the Trump campaign.

• In February 2017, even as it continued to pursue investigations of Trump officials on multiple levels, the FBI had acknowledged it had no evidence to support the central claim of its inquiry: that Trump team members had worked with the Kremlin. Newly released documents from the Senate Judiciary Committee show that after publication of a New York Times report headlined “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence,” Peter Strzok, the FBI official who discussed the need for an “insurance policy” in case Mr. Trump got elected, wrote that the agency was unaware of any such contacts.

• The primary source for the infamous Steele dossier on Mr. Trump was a Washington-based Ukrainian émigré and think-tank scholar, not some high-level Russian informant. U.S. intelligence agencies warned law enforcement that much of the supposed intelligence was at best bunkum, at worst disinformation supplied by the Kremlin.

All this comes on top of what Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, discovered late last year: FBI officials doctored information to get judges to approve Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants and ignored or played down evidence that undermined their investigation. All the while, officials leaked damaging and selective information to friendly media to convince the country they were on to something.

We know Mr. Biden was kept abreast of aspects of the investigation. He took part in a January 2017 Oval Office meeting that discussed a taped phone call between Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador a week earlier. We know that his boss wanted to be told everything the FBI investigators were doing. We know that Susan Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser and a leading contender for Mr. Biden’s vice presidential pick, was also closely involved in reviewing aspects of the FBI’s activities.

What else did Mr. Biden know? When did he first learn about the investigation? Did he receive information from that August 2016 briefing-cum-eavesdropping operation the FBI conducted with the Trump campaign? Did he press for the prosecution of Mr. Flynn? There are many more questions to be asked of a presidential candidate about what he can recall of such a critical period in recent history.

Mr. Biden’s widening memory lapses were once thought by advisers to be a critical electoral liability. But if he can get from here to Nov. 3 assisted by a complaisant press corps disinclined to help him recall those last months of the Obama administration, the failing memory may turn out to be his greatest asset.