Beyond Biden’s cognitive challenges, a more significant issue emerges in the recently released audio recording of special counsel Robert Hur interviewing him in October 2023 about his unlawful possession of classified documents.

Hur had Biden cold on the same federal felonies special counsel Jack Smith charged Donald Trump with just four months earlier.

In the first 13 minutes of the Hur tapes made public late Friday, Biden appears to wander off-topic and struggles to recall important dates, which aligns with Hur’s convenient conclusion: guilty, yet too mentally diminished to stand trial, described as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

However, the entire audio reveals a different side: Biden is well-informed when beneficial to him but becomes elusive and evasive whenever he senses the prosecutors are laying a trap. Cunningly strategic.

His lawyer, Bob Bauer, one of five attorneys nursing him through the interview, interrupts every time Biden might incriminate himself and laughs like a hyena when his client gets feisty or cracks a sarcastic joke at the prosecutors’ expense.

At one point, Hur says: “You appear to have a photographic recall,” after Biden spent 12 minutes describing the layout of his house in excruciating detail.

You can hear the prosecutors’ frustration — they’re in a constitutional straitjacket and faced with a five-hour time limit. Biden reminds them out of the gate that he has just got off the phone with Bibi Netanyahu, discussing the Oct. 7 attack on Israel the previous day, to remind them they are keeping him from important business.

The bottom line is Biden lies throughout. He denies keeping classified material for his personal use because he’s so upright and honorable.

Yet prosecutors found reams of it in his house, garage, and Biden-Penn Center office. They had a recorded conversation with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer in which Biden said he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs” in the basement of his Virginia home.

In the interview, not conducted under oath, Biden says he had nothing to do with packing up his vice presidential residence on Jan. 7, 2017, or moving boxes containing classified material to his flashy new digs in Virginia. He claims his staff did it all without his input.

But Hur knew Biden was “personally involved in the move.”

“He selected [the furniture], directed some of the packing, and was personally present for the entirety of the move,” the Hur Report states. “One military aide recalled seeing him ‘packing by himself’ and ‘just him moving his stuff one at a time into the . . . truck’ at the Naval Observatory on moving day, and Secret Service agents saw Mr. Biden ‘moving boxes’ at the ‘Virginia house’ during the weekend of his move into that house.”

They had caught him red-handed.

But now they were faced with a dilemma: Do they find the sitting president criminally liable and label him a pathological liar, causing a massive scandal and constitutional crisis?

Or do they use his age and mental fog as an excuse not to charge him?

Pretty clear which was the easier path.