DeSantis sounds alarm over Hur report: Biden can't stand trial, but can handle nuclear codes?
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Saturday floated the invocation of the 25th Amendment against President Biden and questioned how the Democrat can responsibly handle the nuclear football after Special Counsel Robert Hur questioned his fitness to stand trial.
Since the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, a military aide has accompanied the commander-in-chief at all times with a secured briefcase containing nuclear launch options and site locations.
DeSantis told Fox News that Hur, the former U.S. attorney for Maryland, depicted Biden as a man "too senile to actually stand trial" for willful mishandling of classified information.
"I think that that is something that – OK, you can't stand trial, but somehow you can have the nuclear codes?" DeSantis said on "Life, Liberty & Levin."
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"What about invoking the 25th Amendment then, if that's what it's going to be?" he asked, citing the amendment ratified in the wake of the Kennedy assassination that codified presidential succession and provided levers to remove an incapacitated president from office.
DeSantis said the report showed Biden had a penchant for wrongly retaining documents throughout his time in government, and suggested his infractions were worse than those of Hillary Clinton – who also was not prosecuted.
Biden engaged in willful retention of classified information over several decades, the governor argued, while Clinton simply shielded her governmental communications from FOIA and other requirements, whether the information within was classified or not, via a server in her Westchester County, N.Y. mansion.
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Just as in Biden's case with Hur declining to recommend prosecution, in 2016 then-FBI Director James Comey held a press conference to criticize Clinton's mishandling of classified information while explaining why he wouldn't prosecute the former Secretary of State.
"[Clinton] was willing to risk exposure … by having this private server [but] Biden, I think, was even more willful because he was doing this [as] a pattern of practice," DeSantis told Fox News.
He noted Biden also "sprinkled" the classified documents among several unsecured locations, including a University of Pennsylvania-linked office in the District of Columbia, as well as in a box that Hur described as too tattered to move that had sat on the floor of his Greenville, Del. garage.
"So clearly, they had the goods if they wanted to go forward and recommend [charges]. [He's n]ow, of course, a sitting president; that's a separate issue," the former 2024 presidential candidate went on.
"But they're hanging their hat on the fact that this guy is effectively not mentally competent to stand trial – How pathetic is it for our country that this is the guy that has the nuclear codes?"