This is an opinion column.

President Joe Biden “did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended, and forgetting…when his term began.” Biden had hoped that Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s report would clear him from mishandling classified information. It may have ended his candidacy instead.

While Hur declined to prosecute Biden for mishandling classified documents, it was far from the exoneration Biden had hoped. Hur’s report “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”

Biden expected to be able to distinguish himself from former-President Donald Trump’s handling of sensitive information, but Hur concluded that the main difference in the cases was Trump’s alleged cover-up. Trump’s case is different because “he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it.”

Democrats hoped to make the 2024 election another referendum on Trump, but Biden is now a compromised messenger. He has effectively lost the moral high ground on what is likely the strongest criminal case against Trump.

More devastating to Biden’s candidacy is the report’s independent confirmation of Biden’s waning mental faculties. Americans have seen with their own eyes and ears countless examples of the octogenarian Biden’s mental slips. Hur confirms those as a reason Biden couldn’t be successfully prosecuted even if he wasn’t the sitting president of the United States.

The report states, “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023.” As a consequence, Biden would present himself to a jury “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Hur notes that Biden’s recall was so bad that he could “not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”

“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden responded during a press conference following the report’s release. Biden blamed his poor recollection on the five hours of in-person interviews immediately following Hamas’s October attack on Israel, when “I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”

In a letter responding to the report, Richard Sauber, Special Counsel to the President, and Bob Bauer, Biden’s personal counsel took exception to Hur’s characterization of Biden’s mental faculties.

The damage has already been done.

Biden won’t be able to explain Hur’s report away because it is independent confirmation of what most Americans already suspected. The president’s only option is to be front-and-center in every aspect of his 2024 campaign. This is the same president who wouldn’t even take a softball interview for the Super Bowl.

While some sympathetic members of the media might downplay the special counsel’s report, Democrats who actually want to keep the White House should immediately be lining up behind another candidate. Given that a vast majority of Americans don’t want either Trump or Biden running for the presidency, the first party not to nominate one of the two has an immensely favorable track to electoral success. Republicans don’t seem to be interested in a different strategy. Hur’s report may force Democrats to consider one.

Smith is a recovering political attorney with four boys, two dogs, a bearded dragon, and an extremely patient wife. He’s a partner in a media company, a business strategy wonk, and a regular on talk radio. Please direct outrage or agreement to [email protected] or @DCameronSmith on X or @davidcameronsmith on Threads.