President Biden defended his memory in televised remarks on Thursday evening, after a report from special counsel Robert Hur on the president’s mishandling of classified documents described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and suggested he could not recall when his son Beau had died, even within several years.
“I know there’s some attention paid to some language in the report about my recollection of events — it was even referenced that I don’t remember when my son died,” Biden said. “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
He went on to explain that he participated in a five-hour interview over the course of two days to discuss events going back 40 years, while managing an “international crisis” in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel.
“Their task was to make a decision about whether to move forward with charges in this case,” Biden said of investigators. “That was the counsel’s decision to make, and they decided not to move forward. For any extraneous commentary, they don’t know what they’re talking about. It has no place in this report.”
At the conclusion of his remarks, Biden took questions from reporters, who pressed him on his memory.
“My memory is so bad that I let you speak,” Biden said to Fox News’s Peter Doocy.
Yet moments after defending his memory, Biden appeared to refer to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico while answering a question about hostage negotiations in Gaza. “The conduct of the response in Gaza — in the Gaza Strip — has been over the top,” Biden said.
The special counsel’s report says investigators found Biden’s “memory was significantly limited” when they conducted interviews with the president. Even in recordings from 2017 of conversations between Biden and his ghostwriter, Mark Zwontizer, Biden was “often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries,” the report says.
In the special counsel’s interviews last October, investigators found Biden’s memory to be even worse. He did not remember when his term as vice president ended in one interview or when it began in another interview.
Investigators thus found 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.”
Hur announced Thursday that he would not recommend that Biden face charges for his mishandling of classified documents after leaving the office of the vice presidency, though he found that Biden “willfully retained” such materials.
“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,” the report said, adding that Biden “is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.”
Investigators didn’t believe they could prove that Biden “intended to do something the law forbids.”
“We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” Hur’s report reads. “We would conclude the same even if there was no policy against charging a sitting president. Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified information after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”
“These materials included (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods. FBI agents recovered these materials from the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home,” the report added.