Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said that Attorney General Merrick Garland is at a crossroads after Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Hur declined to charge President Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents because of his mental state.
Hur’s report, which was made public on Thursday, found that after a months-long investigation, Biden "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials," but he concluded that no criminal charges were warranted, because based on "direct interactions with and observations of" the president, Hur and his team said "t would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness."
Hawley, who also served as attorney general of Missouri from 2017 to 2019, said Friday that Garland "can’t have it both ways" by not charging the president and also declining to recommend invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, which authorizes the vice president and a majority of the president's cabinet or Congress to decide whether the president is unable to perform their duties.
"I'm calling on [Garland] publicly now to do what I think is required under the law in the Constitution . . . either charge the president, or he will go to the cabinet and tell them, ‘I believe we have to invoke the 25th Amendment.’ He's got to do one or the other," Hawley told Fox News Digital in an interview.
"If he doesn't, it will just confirm what everybody thinks, which is that there are two tiers of justice and that Garland himself is completely complicit in the corruption of this administration," Hawley said.
