The Biden-Harris campaign and surrogates were forced to do damage control on Friday after the Hur report painted a scathing picture of President Biden’s age and memory.
The Biden-Harris campaign, its surrogates and allies were forced to do damage control on Friday after special counsel Robert Hur’s report about President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents painted a scathing picture of his age and memory, raising new questions for voters nine months before the November election.
Despite Hur not bringing criminal charges, his report levied what amounted to a political indictment against the 81-year-old president, with investigators writing that a main reason for not pursuing charges was because “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.”
Biden clapped back in a hastily-scheduled news conference Thursday night, just hours after the report was released, telling reporters, “I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing.”
The president’s top surrogates, from Vice President Kamala Harris to congressional Democrats, kept pushing back on Friday, dismissing the special counsel’s report as “politically motivated” and “inappropriate.”
The Biden campaign declined to comment when asked how it’s trying to quell renewed concerns about the president’s age.
A source familiar with the campaign’s thinking that Republicans attacking the president’s age is nothing new, saying that strategy didn’t work in 2020 and won’t work in 2024, when the source said voters value experience and wisdom as well.
Here are five ways Biden allies are striking back:
Biden surrogates have been quick to point out that Robert Hur, a Republican, was appointed by former President Donald Trump to be U.S. Attorney in Maryland in 2018. However, it was Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden-appointee, who chose Hur to lead the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
Some are now accusing Hur of having an agenda despite not having enough evidence to criminally indict Biden.
“At the end of the day, it looks as though the special counsel couldn’t charge him with anything, so he just threw the books at him anyway,” said former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile, an ABC News contributor. “The report read like it was going to get published in the New York Post or on Trump campaign website. It did not read like a legal document.”
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., in an interview with ABC News on Thursday, called the report’s descriptions of Biden “partisan editorializing by a Republican-appointed prosecutor.”
“This is a Republican special counsel who completely went out of his way to editorialize, to include material in his report that is unnecessary and irrelevant to what he was tasked with doing,” Goldman said, of Hur. “The fact that he’s a Republican and he’s exonerating President Biden, he knows he’s going to be under attack because Republicans want to create this false equivalency between President Biden and former President Trump.”
Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, at an unrelated news conference on Friday, deemed the comments by Hur “unfair” and “unnecessary,” also noting he was a Republican appointee.
“I smell a rat in the comments that were made,” he told reporters.
