WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden Speaking at the White House on Thursday evening, he forcefully defended himself against accusations that he suffers from memory loss in response to the special counsel Report by Robert Hur about working with confidential information.
Huron’s report characterization of the president’s mental training stated that his memory was “significantly limited both during his 2017 taped interviews with the dreamer and during the 2023 interview with our office.”
The report also says that Biden didn’t even remember when his son Beau died for several years.
“How dare he bring that up?” Biden said, adding that when he was asked about Beau’s death during the investigation, he thought it was “none of their damn business.”
Biden’s son Beau He died of brain cancer in 2015.
“I don’t need anybody to remind me of his passing,” Biden said Thursday night, repeating that he wears his late son’s rosary beads and honors him with a service every Memorial Day. The president often mentions Beau in his speeches, especially when discussing loss and grief.
In response to the reporter’s question, Biden said, “My memory is good.”
Later in his speech, Biden mistakenly referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as Mexican President. It was the third time this week that Biden was answering a question about the Israel-Hamas war. confused the heads of state.
Biden appeared hours after Hurd announced his report working with confidential documents. Hur declined to prosecute the president, but found that he “willfully withheld and disclosed classified material after the vice presidency while an individual citizen.”
White House officials concluded late Thursday that Biden should directly address the special counsel’s most damning allegations and express his anger about the report directly, according to two people familiar with the decision.
Senior Biden aides believed it was important for the president to voice what they viewed as purely political criticism of Hur because they say the special counsel is worried about potential backlash from conservatives for not charging Biden with a crime, one of the people said. .
The White House also felt the attacks on the president’s memory were “out of line” and “gratuitous,” as evidenced by the president’s fiery statements about knowing when his late son Beu died, the source said.
Biden reiterated Thursday night made a report of the special commissioner on discrimination Between his handling of classified documents compared to former President Donald Trump. Earlier in the day, he briefly addressed the report in a pre-announced speech, saying he was “particularly pleased” that it “made clear the stark differences between this case and Donald Trump.”
Asked by a reporter Thursday night about what he would do differently, Biden talked about the importance of controlling the transfer of materials.
“I should have done it,” he said.
“I didn’t know how half of the boxes got into my garage until I found out the workers had packed them up and put them together and taken them to the garage at my house,” he said.
But Biden pushed back on the report’s language that he “deliberately withheld” classified documents, saying such claims were “not only misleading, but simply wrong.”
Biden also denied sharing classified information, including with the ghostwriter.
“I guarantee you,” he said.
In response to part of Hur’s report, Biden detailed a 2017 conversation with the ghostwriter in which he said he “found all this classified stuff down there,” according to the report. “Some of this may be classified, so be careful,” she told her fan in one recording.
The report also questioned whether a jury would have convicted Biden had Hur decided to press charges.
“We also believe that at trial, Mr. Biden is likely to present himself to the jury as a sympathetic, well-intentioned elderly person with impaired memory, as he did when we interviewed him. “Based on our direct interactions and observations with him, he is someone that many jurors will want to determine reasonable doubt,” the report states. “It would have been difficult to convince a jury that they should charge him—the former president, who by then was in his eighties—with a felony that required a state of mental will.”