


Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday described a special counsel report that called President Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity into question as “politically motivated,” saying the characterization of the president’s memory “could not be more wrong on the facts.”
Addressing reporters at the White House, Harris also noted that Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur came a day after the October 7 Hamas attack against Israel and that “it was an intense moment for the commander in chief of the United States of America.”
While Hur — whose report addressed his probe into the president’s handling of classified documents during the interregnum between his tenure as vice president and his entry into the Oval Office — did not recommend charges against the president, he did note that Biden’s “memory was significantly limited” and that he was “often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and rely on his own notebook entries.”
According to the report, Biden could not remember when he served as vice president, nor could he recall, “even within several years,” when his son Beau passed away.
Hur’s report states that investigators decided against bringing charges because 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.”
Investigators added that a jury would likely find Biden “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden himself attacked the investigators’ comments about his age and mental state in a press conference Thursday that appeared to be an attempt at damage control. During the press conference, he said of investigators’ questions about Beau’s death that it “wasn’t any of their damn business.” He also appeared to forget the name of the church from which Beau received his rosary and referred to Egyptian leader Abdel Fatah El-Sisi as the president of Mexico.