Special counsel delivers Trump a Biden attack line on a silver platter

The president is not a crook. But there may be something more unforgivable in the court of public opinion. The president is old.

That is what will linger from Joe Biden’s pyrrhic victory at the hands of the justice department on Thursday. True, he will not face criminal charges over his handling of highly classified documents when a private citizen, despite an awkward photo revealing papers stashed in a broken cardboard box in his garage, according to special counsel Robert Hur.

But most striking among the reasons that Hur gave for his decision was that 81-year-old Biden “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

The special counsel had delivered an attack line to Donald Trump’s election campaign on a silver platter. Only in America could Trump gain a political lift from 91 criminal charges even as his opponent suffers a political setback from not being charged at all.

And Trump, who is 77, is at least as likely to speak gobbledygook as Biden, recently confusing his Republican opponent Nikki Haley with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Yet as in so many other areas, he is somehow given a free ride, in part because he is a white hot ball of anger who just seems younger, in part because his age seems trivial compared to his alleged crimes and misdemeanours, including a far more serious classified documents case.

But Hur still wrote that Biden’s memory was “significantly limited” when he was interviewed by members of his prosecution team. It “appeared hazy” regarding the debate about US forces in Afghanistan and could not recall the years when he was vice-president. Most startlingly, Biden “did not remember, even within several