By Steve Neavling
The special counsel investigating President Biden’s handling of classified documents recommended no criminal charges, but it paints a harsh picture of a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
The 345-page report could have been reason to celebrate Biden, if not for the portrait of the 81-year-old president’s mental faculties.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Biden criticized the report for its “extraneous commentary” about his age and mental acumen, The New York Times reports.
“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” Biden said.
The president appeared to choke back tears when he referred to the report’s assertion that he didn’t recall what year his son Beau died.
“How the hell dare he raise that,”Biden said. “Every Memorial Day we hold a service remembering him attended by friends and 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 report was authored by Robert Hur, a former U.S. attorney appointed by Donald Trump and later tapped to serve as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
During the investigation, Hur interviewed Biden for five hours over two days and said the president’s memory was so fuzzy that prosecutors would be unlikely to convince jurors that Biden knew his handling of classified documents was wrong.
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his 80s — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” Hur wrote.
In a written response to the report, Biden suggested he was distracted during the interview.
“I 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,” Biden wrote. “I just believed that’s what I owed the American people.”
