The investigator said Biden presented as a « sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory » — a political gift to Trump and the GOP.
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are old and speak less fluidly than they used to. When speaking, both have a tendency to forget things or mix up names.
But though Trump is being prosecuted in four different criminal cases, he has not yet been unlucky enough to have a special counsel publicly weigh in on his mental fitness.
Biden’s the one who now has that problem.
Special counsel Robert Hur — appointed to investigate why classified documents from the Obama administration were found at Biden’s home and office in 2022 — has concluded his investigation by recommending no criminal charges.
Yet in his report, released Wednesday, Hur made repeated assertions about what he calls Biden’s “faulty memory” and even “diminished faculties.”
He says that when his team interviewed Biden last October, the president repeatedly failed to remember the years in which certain major life events happened — for instance, the years his vice presidency started and ended. “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” the report says.
Democrats have publicly cried foul, saying Hur’s report is designed to hurt Biden politically. (Hur had served as a US attorney under Trump, though it was Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, who appointed him special counsel.) Biden’s attorneys disputed that the president’s “lack of recall of years-old events” was anything unusual, saying the report’s framing of Biden’s memory wasn’t “accurate or appropriate.”
The whole situation was strikingly reminiscent of when the Justice Department wrapped up the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails without charges — but with then-FBI Director James Comey’s public criticism of Clinton as “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information.
