CONWAY, S.C.—During a campaign rally, former President Donald Trump weighed in on a special counsel report about President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
President Trump delivered his remarks in a “Get Out the Vote” rally in Conway, South Carolina, two weeks before the state is due to hold its first in the South primary election.
Both President Trump and President Biden have faced investigation for mishandling classified government documents. However, while criminal proceedings into President Trump are ongoing, Special Counsel Robert Hur ruled that President Biden should not be charged despite evidence that he willfully retained classified information.
But that report also cast fresh doubts on President Biden’s mental acuity.
President Biden, who entered office in January 2021 as the oldest president in U.S. history, has long been subject to concerns about his mental fitness for the job.
The report ruled that President Biden shouldn’t be charged, in part because he would appear as “an elderly man with a poor memory,” and it would be too easy for a jury to find sympathy with him and not convict him.
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his 80s—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” the report says.
The report lists two instances of severe lapses in memory that President Biden exhibited during interviews with investigators and the ghostwriter of his book, including forgetting when he was vice president and forgetting when his son Beau Biden died.
Speaking to a huge crowd in Conway, President Trump addressed the findings of the report.
“As you probably know, two days ago, the Biden ‘Department of Injustice’ let crooked Joe off the hook for some of his other egregious crimes—including his brazen theft of classified documents long before he was ever president,” President Trump said.
“This is yet more proof that we have a weaponized, two-tiered system of justice in this country.
“Crooked Joe got off scot-free after willfully stealing gigantic numbers of classified documents and stuffing them in his drawers, stashing them in crumpled boxes, and leaving them strewn all over his garage floor next to his Corvette.”
Critics of the Department of Justice (DOJ) decision to not charge President Biden have also led to calls that criminal proceedings against President Trump on his documents case be dropped.
President Trump repeated these calls during his speech.
“If there was one shred of honesty or decency left in the radical left Democrat Party and the Biden DOJ ... the entire phony Boxes Hoax would be dropped immediately,” he said.
President Trump added that if President Biden is too mentally impaired to be charged, he should also be considered unfit for the presidency.
“The special counsel’s report tries to let Biden off by claiming that he is too mentally incompetent to convict at a trial,“ President Trump said. ”But if Joe Biden is not fit to charge, then he is not fit to serve as our commander in chief.”
Some congressional Republicans have already called on the presidential cabinet to activate the 25th Amendment to remove President Biden from office, at which point Vice President Kamala Harris would become president.
Replace Foreign Aid With Loans
President Trump also called for the United States to end the practice of foreign aid in the form of gifts, calling instead for the U.S. to offer generous loans to allies.“From this point forward, are you listening U.S. Senate(?), no money in the form of foreign aid should be given to any country unless it is done as a loan, not just a giveaway,” President Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “It can be loaned on extraordinarily good terms, like no interest and an unlimited life, but a loan nevertheless.”
He added, “We should never give money anymore without the hope of a payback, or without ‘strings’ attached. The United States of America should be ‘stupid’ no longer.”
The post was an oblique reference to a $118 billion foreign security package that recently failed in the Senate after President Trump expressed opposition to it. President Trump mentioned this during the rally too.
“This week we also had another massive victory that every conservative should celebrate: We crushed Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous open borders bill. Crushed it,” President Trump told the crowd.
President Trump is currently dominating the race in South Carolina in the polls. Only former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, is still in the race against him.
South Carolina Republicans will go to the polls on Feb. 24.
