{"id":838,"date":"2024-02-09T12:07:01","date_gmt":"2024-02-09T12:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/09\/special-counsel-report-paints-scathing-picture-of-bidens-memory\/"},"modified":"2024-02-09T12:07:01","modified_gmt":"2024-02-09T12:07:01","slug":"special-counsel-report-paints-scathing-picture-of-bidens-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/09\/special-counsel-report-paints-scathing-picture-of-bidens-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Special counsel report paints scathing picture of Biden\u2019s memory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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President Biden, during interviews with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents, had trouble recalling the years he served as vice president. He could not pinpoint, even within several years, when his son Beau had died. His memory about a crucial debate on troop levels in Afghanistan was hazy.<\/p>\n

The first day of questioning, at the White House in early October, Biden could not recall when his vice-presidential term had ended. \u201cIf it was 2013 \u2014 when did I stop being vice president?\u201d he asked, apparently not recalling that he left office in January 2017.<\/p>\n

The next day, as the interviews continued, he could not remember when his term began, saying, \u201cIn 2009, am I still vice president?\u201d<\/p>\n

Special counsel Robert K. Hur\u2019s report, while concluding that criminal charges were not merited for Biden\u2019s careless handling of classified documents, painted a devastating portrait of an 81-year-old president whose age has become a central issue in his reelection campaign, saying his memory was \u201csignificantly limited\u201d and that he had \u201climited precision and recall.\u201d One reason prosecutors concluded they would have trouble pursuing a case was that a jury might see Biden as an appealing \u2014 if forgetful \u2014 senior citizen.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,\u201d the prosecutors wrote in their report released Thursday. \u201cBased on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him \u2014 by then a former president well into his eighties \u2014 of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Biden responded to the special counsel\u2019s report in an angry appearance at the White House on Thursday evening. \u201cI know what the hell I\u2019m doing,\u201d he told reporters.<\/p>\n

He expressed particular fury at Hur for using his son\u2019s death, which he said he remembers every single day, as a means of questioning his acuity. \u201cI don\u2019t need anyone to remind me of when he passed away,\u201d Biden said in remarks that were unusually emotional.<\/p>\n

In essence, the report cleared Biden of any legal hurdles. But it opened \u2014 or reopened \u2014 a series of political questions.<\/p>\n

The report was released a day after Biden twice misstated which German leader he had met with at an event in 2021, saying he spoke with Helmut Kohl, who left office in 1998 and died in 2017, rather than Angela Merkel. Several days earlier he confused the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, with a predecessor, Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996.<\/p>\n

Biden has mixed up the names of his Cabinet members, and during an event in 2022 he called out for a recently deceased congresswoman, attempting to acknowledge her from the stage and apparently forgetting that she had recently died. At another point he struggled to recall the name of the prime minister of Australia and referring to him as \u201cthat fellow Down Under.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden throughout his career has been a gaffe-prone politician who can meander into verbal cul-de-sacs, a trait that at times he has worn as a relatable badge of honor. But in recent years, his verbal missteps have often been seen through the prism of old age, a perception that has been difficult for him to alter after urging skeptics to \u201cjust watch me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hur was charged with determining whether Biden mishandled national secrets, but he repeatedly returned to Biden\u2019s ostensibly poor memory. The coming days and weeks will clarify how much of a political penalty Biden will pay for the unflattering portrait.<\/p>\n

But his political rivals wasted little time seizing on it. \u201cIt just affirms what most Americans already know, which is the president is a good man but cannot continue to serve as our commander in chief beyond January 2025,\u201d said Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.), who is challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination.<\/p>\n

Some Biden allies initially downplayed the severity of the report, saying it would be largely forgotten within days. But as the full scope of the report emerged, Biden officials and allies conceded the portrait of Biden would have lasting consequences and provide a gift to the Trump campaign. Still, they forcefully rejected any talk of the president stepping aside and not running for reelection.<\/p>\n

Inside the White House and throughout the Democratic Party, Democrats directed their fury at Hur, assailing him for his characterization of Biden\u2019s mental fitness and arguing that he went far beyond his mandate of determining whether the president or his aides committed crimes. They cast the report as a partisan shot from a Republican prosecutor, albeit one assigned to the task by Biden-appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a partisan document,\u201d said Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama\u2019s 2012 reelection campaign and is supporting Biden\u2019s reelection. \u201cYou have got a Republican person here who can\u2019t find anything to charge the president with, so he is taking a few partisan political shots.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Democrats also conceded privately that Biden\u2019s age has always been his biggest vulnerability. In recent weeks, the Biden campaign has found more ways for the president to connect personally with voters, believing that would help counteract any concerns that he has lost a step.<\/p>\n

Last month, Biden brought food from a restaurant called Cook Out to a private home in North Carolina, chatting with the family about his administration\u2019s student loan forgiveness program. He has also made stops in recent weeks at a barbershop in South Carolina and a boba tea store in Nevada, visits that aides say rocket around social media and improve Biden\u2019s image among voters, particularly younger ones.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s aides, who insist that he is sharp and detail-oriented despite the occasional verbal stumble, also attributed his struggles to recall specific dates during the Hur interviews to their timing on Oct. 8 and 9, when he was preoccupied by Hamas\u2019s deadly attack on Israel a day earlier.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was so determined to give the special counsel what they needed that I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on Oct. 8 and 9 of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on Oct. 7 and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis,\u201d Biden said in a statement just after the report was released. \u201cI just believed that\u2019s what I owed the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The White House also emphasized that \u2014 unlike in a similar probe of former president Donald Trump \u2014 the special counsel decided against prosecuting. \u201cThe bottom line is the special counsel, in my case, decided against moving with any charges. This matter is now closed,\u201d Biden said on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Yet it\u2019s clear that Hur\u2019s language frustrated Biden\u2019s circle. His attorneys, White House special counsel Richard Sauber and personal attorney Bob Bauer, wrote a letter to Hur vigorously objecting to his comments about Biden\u2019s memory.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe President\u2019s inability to recall dates or details of events that happened years ago is neither surprising nor unusual, especially given that many questions asked him to recall the particulars of staff work to pack, ship, and store materials and furniture in the course of moves between residences,\u201d the lawyers wrote. \u201cThe same predictable memory loss occurred with other witnesses in this investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n

They argued that Hur was treating Biden differently from other witnesses who also had trouble recalling long-ago events, and that he did so \u201cin prejudicial and inflammatory terms.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou refer to President Biden\u2019s memory on at least nine occasions \u2014 a number that is itself gratuitous,\u201d they wrote. \u201cThis language is not supported by the facts, nor is it appropriately used by a federal prosecutor in this context. We request that you revisit your descriptions of President Biden\u2019s memory and revise them so that they are stated in a manner that is within the bounds of your expertise and remit.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, it appears that Hur did not alter the report in response to the attorneys\u2019 arguments.<\/p>\n

The report cites Biden\u2019s recorded conversations with his ghostwriter in 2017, saying they are \u201coften painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.\u201d It added, \u201cIn his interview with our office, Mr. Biden\u2019s memory was worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to recounting Biden\u2019s troubles with dates, the prosecutors suggested he had confused other matters as well. \u201cHis memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he \u2018had a real difference\u2019 of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden is also portrayed as a pack rat who haphazardly stored classified documents in a crowded garage. Documents related to Afghanistan, they wrote, were found \u201cin a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.\u201d<\/p>\n

That state of affairs, they said, could be used by Biden\u2019s attorneys to suggest to a jury that he was merely messy and forgetful, not someone who was intentionally trying to hoard classified documents.<\/p>\n

\u201cA reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy,\u201d the report stated. \u201cRather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement Thursday, House Republican leaders, including Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), called the special counsel\u2019s assessment of Biden\u2019s memory one of the \u201cmost disturbing\u201d aspects of his report.<\/p>\n

\u201cA man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office,\u201d said the statement by Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).<\/p>\n

Trump is facing charges under more serious allegations for taking classified documents, particularly his alleged refusal to return them when asked. And Trump, 77, has struggled with his own memory issues, most recently confusing former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).<\/p>\n

Michael Scherer, Praveena Somasundaram and Mariana Alfaro contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This post appeared first on The Washington Post<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Biden, during interviews with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents, had trouble recalling the years he served as vice president. He could not pinpoint, even within several years, when his son Beau had died. His memory about a crucial debate on troop levels in Afghanistan was hazy. The first day of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":839,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}