Tipsheet

Oh, So That's Who Brought Up Biden's Memory During the Special Counsel Investigation

On Tuesday, Special Counsel Robert Hur testified in a House Judiciary hearing about his bombshell report detailing President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents. As Townhall reported, the report detailed that the president’s memory was becoming a serious issue. 

In the hearing, Hur explained that Biden was captured on audio recording sharing classified information with his ghostwriter. Despite this, Biden claimed that he couldn’t recall this, along with several other statements he previously made. When Hur’s report came out, the White House blew a gasket about his assessment of the president’s memory and tried to downplay the seriousness of the issue.

“My task was to determine whether the president retained or disclosed national defense information willfully. That means, knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids. I could not make that determination without assessing the president’s state of mind. For that reason, I had to consider the president’s memory and overall mental state and how a jury likely would perceive his memory and mental state in a criminal trial,” Hur said in the hearing. 

“The evidence and the president himself put his memory squarely at issue,” Hur stated. “We interviewed the president and asked him about his recorded statement, ‘I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.’ He told us that he didn’t remember saying that to his ghostwriter. He also said he didn’t remember finding any classified material in his home after his vice presidency. And, he didn’t remember anything about how classified documents about Afghanistan made their way to his garage.”

“My assessment in the report about the relevance of the president’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair. Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows…I did not sanitize my explanation nor did I disparage the president unfairly. I explained to the attorney general my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do,” he said. 

As Katie covered, White House spokesperson Ian Sams attacked Special Counsel Hur, saying the inclusion of Biden's state of mind during an interview with investigators was "inappropriate." Former Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that it was “flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions.”

In addition, first lady Jill Biden attacked Hur for revealing that President Biden could not remember details about his son, Beau’s, death.

"We should give everyone grace, and I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points," she wrote in an email to campaign donors, adding that the grief of losing a child is not measured “in years.” 

"If you’ve experienced a loss like that, you know that you don’t measure it in years -- you measure it in grief," she added. "Believe me, like anyone who has lost a child, Beau and his death never leave him."

However, it was revealed that Hur did not bring up the topic of Beau during his interview with the president. Biden himself brought up the topic of his deceased son.