CNN "This Morning" co-host Phil Mattingly was on the receiving end of a fierce dressing down from Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) after he tried to equate the finding in special counsel Robert Hur's on documents President Joe Biden had in his home with the boxes of material found in Mar-a-Lago that Donald Trump refused to return until the FBI showed up.
During his appearance on CNN, Mattingly pressed Goldman — who served as lead majority counsel in Trump's first impeachment trial — on Hur's controversial report about Biden's "willful retention" of documents which received immediate pushback.
Asked of the report, "You don't think that backed it up?' Goldman shot back, "No, no, first of all, the evidence that they gathered that he [Biden] knowingly and willfully retained classified information while he was a private citizen, which is necessary and the special counsel discusses that, is based on such thin evidence."
"When you're talking about notebooks versus actually marked classified documents, that's a significant difference, because President Biden as part of his job took copious notes, some of it must have been on classified information, some unclassified, and he understandably believed his notes were his, and they didn't have classified markings on them — that's a big difference," Goldman added.
"So what you really need to look at is what marked classified documents did he possess that he knew he possessed and maintained," he elaborated. "And the notion that his own credibility or recollection would have anything to do with the evidence which was plainly insufficient, is a fallacy. And not only that, but you're assuming that the defendant in this case would testify at trial." I was a prosecutor for ten years and I did not consider the defendant's credibility as a witness."
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After adding, "I may have considered the defendant's credibility in explaining the evidence and whether or not it would rise to the level of knowing intent," he continued, "So this was extremely gratuitous, unnecessary, and just a political potshot in the middle of an election year when the special counsel knows it's two elderly men who are running for president, and this one who was appointed by Donald Trump wanted to make sure he got his licks in."
Changing direction, host Mattingly brought up Biden's Mexico gaffe in a televised speech late Thursday band Goldman wasn't having it.
'"Yeah, it's also true that Speaker Mike Johnson [R-LA] went on 'Meet the Press' and confused Iran and Israel, which is a much more significant mistake than President Sisi as being in Mexico," Goldman scolded. "I'm not going to sit here saying Mike Johnson has no memory loss or that he's ill-equipped to be speaker of the House because he made an obvious incidental tangential mistake. It's wrong to think that because President Biden made a simple incidental mistake that everyone understood what he was referring to, that that has anything to do with his mental acuity. and especially when you're now trying to compare him to another elderly man who is charged with four indictments, who doesn't believe that the law applies to him, and makes all these mistakes."
Watch the video below or at this link.
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