On May 16th, while I was cut off from the internet, this blog, and just about all of the outside world because Verizon is incompetent and lies to its customers (I was given three definite times when my service issues would be resolved, and all of them proved to be false), Axios finally released some of the audiotapes (after someone leaked them) from the interview between then-President Joe Biden and Special Counsel Robert Hur.

The Justice Department and the White House had refused to do so before the 2024 election (because, see, the Democrats were trying to protect democracy from Donald Trump by ensuring that voters were uninformed…yes, I know it doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what they’ve got) and the Axis media was remarkably uninterested in hearing them, following its favorite party’s lie that the transcripts were good enough.

I knew that the tapes would prove damning: didn’t you? One of the results of this debacle should be that nobody ever accepts transcripts again when there is a recording available. As an earlier example, the transcript of the infamous debate with Trump where Biden descended into gibberish made it seem like he just made a momentary “speako.” And Biden’s White House habitually altered official transcripts to show what the confused sort-of President “meant to say.”

At the time, however, Democrats and their propaganda allies in the news media excoriated Robert Hur for what they called a partisan attack on Biden, when what Hur was really doing was telling the truth. Can’t have that! Hur, you will recall, wrote that Biden should be prosecuted for essentially the same offense Donald Trump was indicted for—mishandling classified documents—but unlike Trump, Joe was too addled and sympathetic in his creeping senility to be convicted. The list of elected officials, pundits and journalists who lied to the public and conveyed the deliberate disinformation that Hur was just making this up is, again, not surprising, but it is still the equivalent of multiple smoking guns. The list includes…

• Serial liar Adam Schiff, whom Californians made a U.S. Senator
• Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who wants to be President; he said that, contrary to Hur’s analysis, Biden was “incredibly competent.”
• Rep. Jamie Raskin, whom all my Trump Deranged Facebook friends think is wonderful…
• Karine Jean-Pierre (of course). She’s historic, you know!
• Joe Scarborough, who hasn’t a shred of credibility left
• Joe Biden himself, who railed at Hur supposedly bringing up the death of his son Beau as “none of his business” when the tapes show that it was Biden who raised it

….and many others. Nice. My favorite, though, was The Atlantic, which published this:

A while back a now-banned commenter was indignant that I had written that former Popehat truth-teller Ken White had become so Trump-deranged that he was no longer trustworthy. Ken is a contributing editor at the magazine. The Ken White I knew would have resigned over that headline, and noisily too.

A disgusted Jonathan Turley writes in the wake of the Hur tapes release,

The real indictment that comes out of these tapes is a type of political racketeering enterprise by the Washington establishment. It took a total team effort from Democratic politicians to the White House staff to the media to hide the fact that the President of the United States was mentally diminished. If there were a political RICO crime, half of Washington would be frog-marched to the nearest federal courthouse. Of course, none of this complicity in the cover-up is an actual crime. It is part of the Washington racket. After all, this is Washington, where such duplicity results not in plea deals but book deals.

No matter how furious objective and patriotic Americans are about this, it isn’t enough.

Meanwhile, Prof. Randy Barnett’s post on Twitter/X is being widely quoted (including by me), as it should be: