Joe Biden lashed out at a report by the US Department of Justice’s special counsel that described the US president as an “old, well-meaning man with a poor memory”, in a hastily arranged press conference at the White House on Thursday evening .
The report released earlier in the day painted a politically damaging picture of Biden even though he was spared criminal charges after a months-long investigation.
The report by special counsel Robert Hur, who oversaw the investigation into the president’s handling of classified materials found in his residences and private offices, concluded that Biden, 81, had “willingly retained and disclosed” sensitive documents.
While the report states that he would not face potentially embarrassing criminal prosecution, it states that “memory was significantly limited” during interviews with Hur’s office in 2023, as well as with a ghostwriter working on his memoirs in 2017. concerns about his advanced age as he tries to convince voters to give him another four years in the White House.
“My memory is fine,” Biden retorted in Thursday night’s news conference, which grew increasingly hostile as reporters shouted questions about his age and mental acuity.
The report said that in interviews with the special counsel’s office the president “did not remember when he was vice president” and could not remember, “even after several years,” when his son, Beau Biden, died.
Biden became visibly angry when talking about the allegations regarding his son: “How the hell dare he bring something like that up,” he said of the special prosecutor. “I don’t need anyone to remind me when he died.”
The report said that thanks to Biden’s “cooperation” with the investigation, jurors at a potential trial could easily be convinced that Biden “made an innocent mistake” and did not intend to break the law.
“We also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview, as a sympathetic, well-intentioned older man with a poor memory,” the report said.
“It would be difficult to convince a jury to convict him – now a former president in his eighties – of a serious crime that requires a willful mental state.”
Biden directly rejected that characterization: “I’m well-intentioned, I’m an old man, and I know what the hell I’m doing. I was president and I got this country back on its feet. I don’t need his recommendation.”
The special prosecutor’s report comes after several embarrassing public gaffes for the president in recent days. Speaking last weekend at an event in Nevada, Biden confused François Mitterrand, the former French president who died in 1996, with the current president, Emmanuel Macron.
Then, at two separate fundraisers in New York on Wednesday, Biden referenced the late German Chancellor Helmut Kohl when telling a story about his interactions with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Biden stumbled again during Thursday’s news conference, referring to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as president of Mexico in response to a reporter’s question about the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The special counsel’s report — and Biden’s stumbles Thursday night — will provide ammunition to critics who have questioned whether the president is fit to serve another term. If he were to win reelection, he would be 82 years old when he takes the oath of office and 86 years old when he leaves office. Donald Trump, 77, the Republican nominee to face Biden in November, raised the issue repeatedly on the campaign trail.
“A man too incompetent to be held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office,” Republican leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives said in a statement.
“We disagree with a number of inaccurate and inappropriate comments” in the report, Richard Sauber, Biden’s special adviser, said in a statement. “The simple truth is that President Biden takes classified information seriously and is committed to protecting it.”
In a letter at the end of the report, Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer and Sauber said the report’s “treatment” of the president’s memory was not “accurate or appropriate.”
“The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a common occurrence among witnesses: lack of recollection of years-old events,” the president’s lawyers added. “Such comments have no place in a Department of Justice report.”
An initial batch of classified material was recovered by Biden’s lawyers in November 2022 from his private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a Washington think tank where he worked occasionally before his election to the White House. Other classified files were found in his residence halls and at the University of Delaware, which houses a collection of documents from his political career, including his time as a U.S. senator.
In January 2023, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned Hur to investigate potential mishandling of government documents. Hur’s 345-page report, submitted to Congress on Thursday, found that Biden withheld classified material, including on military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, after leaving his role as Barack Obama’s vice president.
There were also notebooks containing his notes on national security matters and “sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” the report found.
The report concluded that the materials “may conceivably” have been mistakenly transferred to locations including the University of Delaware. Overall, the report said, the evidence did not establish Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt – the legal standard for criminal convictions.
After the documents were first revealed in January 2023, Republican lawmakers were outraged by criticism from the president and his Democratic colleagues over Trump’s mishandling of sensitive material.
Trump was indicted on charges brought by a separate special prosecutor, Jack Smith, that he illegally stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Prosecutors said the former president had resisted handing over the material for months and lied to authorities, unlike Biden.
Trump has pleaded not guilty.
Trump said in a statement that the Hur report demonstrated the existence of a “two-tiered justice system.”
“The Biden Documents case is 100 times different and more serious than mine. I didn’t do anything wrong and I cooperated much more,” Trump added.