An angry, emotional US President Joe Biden on Thursday defended his mental competence in a rare evening address to Americans to respond to biting comments in a report released hours earlier on his mishandling of classified documents.
Appearing on live television from the White House, Biden was furious over the report’s claim that he was unable to remember even the date of his son Beau’s death in 2015, as well as other key moments in his life.
“My memory is fine,” he said.
Photo: AFP
“There’s even reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden said, visibly fighting to rein in his emotions.
The report from special counsel Robert Hur should have been good news for Biden.
It cleared him of any criminal wrongdoing in his storing of the classified documents, which he had used while vice president under then-US president Barack Obama, at his private home and a former office.
It stands in sharp contrast with a separate criminal investigation into Biden’s likely November presidential rival, former US president Donald Trump, who is accused of taking vast quantities of top-secret documents after leaving the White House in 2021, then obstructing attempts to get them back.
However, Hur unleashed a political bombshell, just nine months from the election, by saying that 81-year-old Biden came across as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Given his reduced mental acuity a jury would not in any case have found him guilty on documents charges, Hur said.
Asked about that comment by reporters in the White House after his formal remarks, Biden said: “I am well meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing.”
“I’m president and I put this country back on its feet,” he said. “Take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president.”
US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson and other top Republican leaders of the House called Hur’s report “deeply disturbing,” and said it showed that Biden was “unfit” for the presidency.
“A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office,” they said in a statement.
Earlier on Thursday, Biden had declared that his exoneration by Hur on any legal issues meant “this matter is now closed.”
However, that clearly was not true — as Biden’s highly unusual, last-minute scheduling of televised remarks showed.
Biden has long been fighting attacks from the right and also some within his own party that he is too old to be president. As he gears up for the November election against Trump, Biden is campaigning on his long experience and his stewardship of a fast-recovering, post-COVID-19 economy.
“I’m the most qualified person in the United States to be president and finish the job,” he said in the late-evening remarks.
However, Biden did not help himself by momentarily mixing up Mexico with Egypt while answering a reporter’s question about Israel’s war in Gaza.
Hur was appointed by Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, last year after classified material was found at the president’s home in Delaware and in a former office.
The 388-page report said that Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” in the period after he left the vice presidency — well before he defeated Trump in 2020 to become president.
Hur — previously nominated by Trump to be the lead prosecutor for the state of Maryland — said documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and other matters were recovered by FBI agents.
However, “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 said. “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.”
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