In a rare evening address to Americans, an incensed and emotional US President Joe Biden vehemently defended his mental competence on Thursday. This response came hours after a report criticizing his handling of classified documents was released.
Broadcast live from the White House, Biden expressed fury over the report’s allegations, particularly the claim that he couldn’t recall the date of his son Beau’s death in 2015 and other significant moments in his life.
“My memory is fine,” he asserted.
“There’s even reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden exclaimed, visibly struggling to contain his emotions.
The report from special counsel Robert Hur should have been a relief for Biden. It absolved him of any criminal wrongdoing regarding the storage of classified documents, which he had utilized during his tenure as vice president under Barack Obama, at his private residence and a former office. This stands in stark contrast to a separate criminal investigation into Biden’s likely opponent in the November presidential election, Donald Trump. Trump is accused of taking significant quantities of top-secret documents after leaving the White House in 2021 and subsequently obstructing attempts to retrieve them.
However, Hur’s assessment unleashed a political bombshell just nine months before the election. He stated that the 81-year-old Democrat came across as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur suggested that given Biden’s diminished mental acuity, a jury would not have found him guilty of charges related to the mishandling of documents.
Asked about that comment by reporters in the White House after his formal remarks, Biden retorted, “I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing.” He emphasized, “I’m president, and I’ve put this country back on its feet. Take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president.”
Speaker Mike Johnson and other top Republican leaders of the House of Representatives deemed Hur’s report “deeply disturbing” and asserted that it demonstrated Biden’s “unfitness” for the presidency. “A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office,” they declared in a statement.
Earlier on Thursday, Biden had proclaimed that his exoneration by Hur regarding any legal matters meant “this matter is now closed.” However, this assertion was evidently not true, as evidenced by Biden’s highly unusual, last-minute scheduling of televised remarks.
Biden has long faced criticism from both the right and some within his own party who argue that he is too old to serve as president. As he prepares for the November election against Trump, whom he views as an existential threat to US democracy, Biden is leaning on his extensive experience and his management of a rapidly recovering post-Covid economy. “I’m the most qualified person in the United States to be president and finish the job,” he asserted in his late-evening remarks.
However, it will be challenging to shake off the impact of Hur’s scathing comments. Biden didn’t do himself any favors either when he momentarily confused Mexico with Egypt while responding to a reporter’s question about Israel’s conflict in Gaza.
Hur was appointed by Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, last year after classified material was discovered at the president’s residence in Delaware and in a former office.
The 388-page report stated that Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” after he left the vice presidency, a period that predates his victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Hur, who had previously been nominated by Trump as the lead prosecutor for the state of Maryland, disclosed that FBI agents recovered documents pertaining to military and foreign policy matters in Afghanistan, among others.
However, Hur clarified, “We conclude the evidence is not sufficient to convict, and we decline to recommend prosecution of Mr. Biden for his retention of the classified Afghanistan documents.”
Hur then remarked that “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Responding to these comments, White House special counsel Richard Sauber and Biden’s personal lawyer Bob Bauer criticized them as neither “accurate nor appropriate.” In a letter to Hur, they argued, “The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events. Such comments have no place in a Department of Justice report.”
The president highlighted that he had participated in five hours of interviews with the special counsel on October 8 and 9, precisely during the onset of the Israel-Hamas crisis.
