ALEX BERENSON: Why we need to humiliate Joe Biden

In the end, the classified documents investigation went nowhere. (Like the similar case involving Donald Trump, it shouldn't have). But along the way, Hur - a well-respected prosecutor who had been the U.S. Attorney for Maryland in Trump's first term - discovered something far more important: proof of Biden's incapacity.

The Hur interview is so crucial because Biden and his handlers went to such lengths to protect Biden from press or public scrutiny even before the 2020 election.Biden used teleprompters for his speeches, of course. His press conferences were rare and closely scripted. He had been told what questions would be asked in advance. Biden's few unscripted, live interactions visible to the public generally came when he left the White House to walk to Marine One. He would occasionally stumble over to the "gaggle" of reporters yelling questions at him and speak for a few seconds.

"In what is supposedly a legal document, these inclusions certainly looked gratuitous-to say the least," the New Yorker wrote in an article about Biden's "righteous fury" over the report.Two days later, the Washington Post would claim in a headline Hur had a "five-hour face-off" with Biden and write:"Hur's description of Biden's demeanor as that of a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" would infuriate Biden's aides, who saw it as sharply at odds with what occurred as the president sat for voluntary questioning."Sharply at odds, huh?I have written before about the media's dereliction of duty in covering Biden's decline, both before and after the Hur report, which continued until his disastrous June 27 debate in Atlanta made covering for him impossible. And I will come back to the media's failure. Hur's report made clear that Biden's cognitive impairment was severe and the White House was covering it up. That scheme should have been the story of the 2024 campaign from the moment the report became public.This is not 20/20 hindsight on my part. On Feb. 9, 2024, the day the report came out, I wrote that it actually might be WORSE for Biden than an actual indictment.Most of the media looked the other way, even as Biden's flubs and lapses visibly worsened in the spring of 2024 despite the protective cocoon around him. But the legacy media is only the second-most important villain here.It was Biden and the people around him, most notably his wife Jill and son Hunter, who insisted that he was fit to serve, and would continue to be until he was 86. Both Jill and Hunt had their reasons. Jill's lust for the trappings of power would be almost comic in its nakedness if it weren't so dangerous; Hunter has champagne taste and a beer budget (or, more accurately in his case, cocaine taste and a meth budget).But, of course, all of them, including Biden, knew the truth. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have gone to such great lengths to hide it.