President Trump said late Friday that he would bar his predecessor, President Biden, from receiving intelligence briefings traditionally given to former presidents, saying that Mr. Biden could not be trusted with sensitive information because a special counsel report concluded he had a “poor memory.”
“There is no need for Joe Biden to continue receiving access to classified information. Therefore, we are immediately revoking Joe Biden’s security clearance and stopping his daily intelligence briefings,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The move is not without precedent. After Mr. Trump left office in 2021, Mr. Biden banned him from receiving the intelligence briefings, saying that Mr. Trump was a security risk because of his “erratic behavior” leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
It was the first time that a former president had been cut out of the briefings, which are provided partly as a courtesy and partly for the moments when a sitting president reaches out to their predecessors for advice. Currently, former Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all receive daily intelligence briefings.
In revoking Mr. Biden’s security clearance, Mr. Trump cited the report by special counsel Robert Hur detailing his probe into Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents after he left the vice presidency in 2017. The eyebrow-raising report said no charges should be brought against Mr. Biden in the case because of how he would present himself to a jury.
“We have also considered that, at 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,” Mr. Hur wrote.
The report details occasions in which Mr. Biden, who was 81 at the time, struggled to remember things while speaking to Mr. Hur’s team. Mr. Biden couldn’t remember when he was vice president under Mr. Obama or when his son, Beau, died.
“The Hur report revealed that Biden suffers from ’poor memory’ and even in his ’prime’ could not be trusted with sensitive information. I will always protect our national security,” Mr. Trump wrote.
Since returning to the White House last month, Mr. Trump revoked the security clearances of roughly 50 former intelligence officials. In an executive order issued hours after his inauguration, Mr. Trump stripped 49 former senior officials of security clearances for signing a letter in 2020 claiming the scandalous data on Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.
Mr. Trump said in the order that the letter was “misleading and inappropriate political coordination” with Mr. Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.
The former senior officials have repeatedly denied that claim, saying their letter merely suggested that Russia might have played a role in spreading allegations about Hunter Biden as part of a wider effort to influence the election.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.