Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated President Biden’s retention of classified documents and portrayed him as a senile old man in his report, is testifying to Gym Jordan’s Fishing Expedition Committee today. Note that as of yesterday Hur is no longer an employee of the Justice Department and is testifying as a private citizen. And he’s got an attorney with a history of defending right-wingers. I have no sense of how that’s been going.
But this morning the DoJ released a slightly redacted transcript of the interview between Biden and Hur, and news outlets are discovering that Hur mischaracterized Biden’s statements rather badly. See Matt Gertz T Media Matters, News outlets that trumpeted Hur’s story now discover “context” and “nuance” in transcript. It seems the full transcript shows that the President sometimes stumbled on names and dates but otherwise knew what he was talking about. So the New York Times and Wshington Post and other news outlets are walking back the truckload of stories they ran questioing Biden’s mental fitness.
I have no doubt that Gym and other MAGAs will latch on to something Hur says today so they can continue to flog their claim that Joe Biden is too senile to put on his own socks. But both sides can play that game.
In other news: GOP Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado has announced he’ll be leaving the House at the end of next week. He’s not going to bother to finish his term. I’m reading that House seats can’t be filled with an appointed replacement, so there would have to be a special election to replace Buck. And the Republican majority in the House keeps shrinking.
In more other news: You probably won’t be surprised to learn that there is no migrant-fueled crime wave going on.
Republican politicians and sympathetic media outlets are claiming that America is in the midst of a violent “crime wave,” driven in part by undocumented immigrants. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states. …
… Notably, the two border states that have completed their Uniform Crime Reports saw particularly sharp declines in murder in 2023, with 15% drop in Texas and 8.8% drop in Arizona. Both states also saw significant declines in violent crime overall. If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up in the data from Texas and Arizona.
See the linked article from Popular Information for data and sources. Basically this is preliminary data from fifteen states that eventually will go into the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report. But there are studies and data going back years showing that migrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born good ol’ boys.
You’ll remember last week that MTG was using the murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student who was killed while out on an exercise run, to make some point about migrants. Being murdered while running appears to be a whole sub-genre of violent crime. Most of the victims are women, but not always — remember Ahmaud Arbery? Of course you do. (Ahmaud Arbery was from Georgia, too, but I don’t remember MTG getting worked up about him the way she’s worked up about Riley Laken. Odd.) A lot of these murders are unsolved. When they are solved, the perpetrator (when the victim is a woman) tends to have a history of violence against women. See, for example, the Eliza Fletcher murder.
Now see Will Leitch, The Murder on My Running Trail, at New York Magazine. The author lives in the same community as Riley Laken and runs on the same trail she took on the day she was murdered. And his wife is a runner, too. “She has told me how often she feels watched on her runs,” Leitch writes. “How she has been followed. How she has been spit at. How she was even once swung at. I have never had any of those fears, not once. Because I am a man.”
The murder of Riley Laken shook the Athens, Georgia, running community hard.
Riley’s murder, the first homicide on campus in more than 30 years, sent a wave of terror through Athens, but it hit the running community particularly hard. Fear was palpable among women runners in the first 24 hours after her death, and their stories made it clear that what I — along with many of my fellow male runners — had thoughtlessly considered a safe, solitary activity has always been far more fraught for half the population. Women spoke of the precautions they constantly have to take, from going out with running buddies to avoiding isolated areas to carrying alert systems, weapons, or even Tasers with them anytime they leave the house. (My primary concern when I set out is whether I remembered my headphones.) Riley’s assault and murder — one of several involving women runners in recent years — was a reminder that every time women go for a run, they have to be conscious of the possibility of male violence. Or, more accurately: They have to be as conscious of the possibility of male violence as they always are. My wife reminded me of the Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
That was the conversation until an undocumented immigrant was charged with the murder. Suddenly everyone stopped talking about male violence. And every Republican politician in Georgia blamed Joe Biden for Riley Laken’s death.
It’s like violent crime doesn’t count until a migrant is the perpetrator. But here’s something else I found today about homicides in the U.S.
In 2020, there were 2,059 females murdered by males in single victim/single offender incidents that were submitted to the FBI for its Supplementary Homicide Report. 12 The key findings of this study, expanded upon in the following sections, dispel many of the myths regarding the nature of lethal violence against females.
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- For homicides in which the victim to offender relationship could be identified, 89 percent of female victims (1,604 out of 1,801) were murdered by a male they knew.
- Eight times as many females were murdered by a male they knew (1,604 victims) than were killed by male strangers (197 victims).
- For victims who knew their offenders, 60 percent (967) of female homicide victims were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers.13
- There were 298 women shot and killed by either their husband or intimate acquaintance during the course of an argument.
Odds are that at least some of those women are killed in Georgia. But in MTG’s world their deaths don’t count.
In other misdirected violent crime news, by now you’ve heard that Sen. Katie Britt, in her State of the Union rebuttal for the ages, told a graphic story about sex trafficking in Texas and blamed it on President Biden. Turns out this happened 20 years ago, during the George W. Bush administration, and in Mexico. As far as I know, Britt has yet to apologize for telling a lie.
Update: Aaron Blake at WaPo provides an account of what went on in the hearing today.
