by Thursday’s decision not to file criminal charges against President Biden for mishandling classified documents should have been an unequivocal legal exoneration.
Rather, it was a political disaster.
The investigation into Mr. Biden’s handling of documents after he became vice president concluded that he was a “well-intentioned elderly man with a poor memory” and that he had “diminished faculties with advancing age” — claims so startling they sparked a fierce and emotional attempt at political damage control by the president in a matter of hours.
Speaking on camera from the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, Biden on Thursday night criticized the report by Robert K. Hurthe special prosecutor, accusing the report’s authors of “strange comments” about his age and mental capacity.
“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” the president said flatly.
Biden appeared to take special exception to the report’s claim that during interviews with FBI investigators, he could not remember what year his son Beau died.
“How the hell dare you bring that up?” the president said, appearing to hold back tears. “Every Memorial Day we hold a memorial service for him attended by friends, family and the people who loved him. I don’t need anyone, I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.”
The president’s notable appearance before reporters underscored the political damage Hur’s report could cause despite the lack of criminal charges. The report’s discussion of the president’s memory and age was repeated throughout the 345-page document and was quickly seized on by Republicans, including Biden’s likely opponent in the 2024 election, former President Donald J. Trump.
In the report, Hur said the then-80-year-old president’s memory was so hazy during five hours of interviews over two days that it would be difficult to convince jurors that Biden knew his handling of the documents was wrong. Hur predicted in the report that if the president were impeached, his lawyers would “emphasize these limitations on his removal.”
In part because of Biden’s memory, Hur declined to recommend charging the president for what the report described as intentional withholding of national security secrets, including some documents shared by the president that implicated “sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him (by then a former president in his 80s) of a serious crime requiring an obstinate state of mind,” Hur wrote.
In his own written statement issued just after the report was made public, Biden seemed to suggest a reason why he was distracted.
“I was so determined to give the special counsel what he needed that I went ahead with five hours of in-person interviews over two days, on October 8 and 9 of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7 and “I was in the middle of managing an international crisis,” he wrote. “I just believed that was what I owed to the American people.”
The president’s attorneys, Bob Bauer and Richard Sauber, objected in a Feb. 5 letter to Hur’s description of the president’s memory.
“It is unfair to admit that the president would be asked about events that occurred years ago, pressured to give his ‘best’ recollections, and then blamed for his limited memory,” the lawyers wrote. “The president’s inability to remember dates or details of events that occurred years ago is neither surprising nor unusual.”
Concerns about Biden’s age have been a recurring theme of his presidency for the past three years. Prompted in part by a video in which the president appears weak or stumbling in public, many voters have expressed concern about his physical and mental condition as he seeks to remain in the White House until he is 86.
Biden has tried to poke fun at the issue, insisting that with age comes wisdom.
During Wednesday’s fundraiser, Biden twice recalled a 2021 conversation with Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, who died in 2017. His spokesman later said he was wrong, as many public officials do. In his remarks Thursday night, Biden confused the presidents of Mexico and Egypt, making exactly the kind of mistake his staff would have wanted him to avoid at a time when his mental acuity is being questioned.
On Thursday, he angrily disputed the suggestion that he was unfit to serve. When asked about polls showing the American people are concerned about his age, he pointed to the reporter and said, “That’s his judgment. That is your judgment.”
Then he added: “That is not the judgment of the press,” although he seemed to mean that it was not the judgment of the public. When asked why he shouldn’t step aside and allow someone else from his party to be the Democratic nominee, he said, “Because I am the most qualified person in this country to be president of the United States and finish the job I started.” .
Biden’s advisers have repeatedly insisted that, despite how the president sometimes appears in public, he remains sharp and tireless when in private, in conversations with advisers or in meetings with foreign leaders.
But the report released Thursday challenges those descriptions, based not on brief snippets of Biden posted on social media, but on hours-long interactions with the president in controlled settings. And the descriptions of his memory were more vivid than typically found in legal documents like the one released Thursday.
In the report, Hur wrote that in a recorded 2017 conversation between Biden and the ghostwriter of his book, Biden struggled to “remember events” and “sometimes struggled to read and convey his own notebook entries.” Hur said interviews in 2023 with investigators were even worse.
“He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it were 2013, when did I stop being vice president?”), and forgetting the second day of the interview. when began his term (‘in 2009, am I still vice president?’),” the report says. “He couldn’t remember, even after several years, when his son Beau died.”
Hur was nominated by Trump to be a federal prosecutor in Maryland, but was later tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland to lead the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
Biden’s lawyers have been arguing for more than a year that the discovery of classified documents in Biden’s offices and his Delaware home was nothing more than an accidental oversight, and certainly not criminal behavior like the 37 felony charges. filed against Trump for his handling of classified material after leaving office.
On Thursday, the special counsel reached the same conclusion after reviewing a total of seven million documents, an event celebrated inside the White House and at the president’s re-election campaign headquarters, where aides are preparing to wage a battle. fierce battle to prevent Mr. Trump’s return to the White House.
But the report refuted the president’s lawyers’ long-standing argument that Biden never put the nation’s national security at risk. Investigators found documents at Biden’s home in a “box in the garage, near a collapsed dog cage, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.”
Although Hur concluded that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” he wrote that Biden took classified documents and notebooks about Afghanistan in 2017, after leaving the vice presidency, and shared some of those. documents with his ghostwriter.
Hur’s harsh language could set the stage for Trump and his allies to launch a new round of political attacks on Biden for doing exactly the same kinds of things Trump is accused of doing. And it will likely complicate the months-long effort by Biden and his advisers to draw clear distinctions between the two presidents’ actions.
But the most serious political damage likely has to do with Biden’s age, which many veteran Democrats already believe is the president’s greatest weakness. Some have said privately that they were worried that something would emerge that would remind voters of the age issue, including the possibility of a fall or mental stumble.
Republicans began using the report to attack Biden almost immediately, sometimes going far beyond the prosecutor’s actual conclusions.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said on social media, falsely, that “the special counsel decided not to file charges against Biden because they believe he has age-related dementia.”
In some ways, Thursday’s report was the worst of all worlds: an official description of Biden behind the scenes, suggesting that with age comes stumbles.
