President Joe Biden on Thursday night strongly disputed new claims by Justice Department special counsel Robert Hurr that he “willfully retained and disclosed classified material” as a private individual and that he had shown poor memory during an interview about that material.
“My memory has not gotten any worse,” Biden told reporters in a nationally televised address at the White House hours after Hurr released his report.
“My memory is good.”
“I’m an old man and I know what the hell I’m doing,” Biden said, responding to a question from a reporter who noted Hur’s reference to the president as an old man.
“I was president and I got this country back on its feet. I don’t need his recommendation,” Biden said.
But minutes later, Biden referred to the Egyptian president as “the president of Mexico.”
Biden was visibly angered by Hurr’s claim that he could not remember the year his son Beau Biden died, which the special counsel cited among other examples of Biden’s memory “appearing hazy” during interviews with investigators.
The president said that when asked a question about that year Bo died “I thought to myself [it] it was none of their damn business.’
“How the hell dare she put that,” Biden said of Hur. “I don’t need anyone to remind me when he died.”
The main legal takeaway from Hurr’s report was the special counsel’s decision not to criminally charge Biden, despite the president’s deliberate withholding of classified documents and the disclosure of some classified material to the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir.
The material has been kept at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and an office in Washington, D.C., since he stepped down as vice president in January 2017.
Biden’s lawyers said the material began to be discovered in late 2022, months after former President Donald Trump was indicted on charges related to keeping classified documents at his Florida home after leaving the White House and obstructing efforts of officials to retrieve these documents. .
Biden said, “I’ve seen the headlines since the report came out about the intentional retention of my documents.”
“These allegations are not only misleading, they are simply wrong,” the president said.
Biden vehemently denied sharing the material with the author.
And the president noted that Hurr wrote on page 215 of the same report that “while it is natural to assume that Mr. Biden put the Afghanistan documents in the box on purpose and that he knew they were there, there is actually a lack of evidence that points”.
“We do not know why, how or by whom the documents were placed in the box,” the report said.
On page 12 of the report, Biden noted, the special counsel wrote: “For other recovered classified documents, after a thorough investigation, the decision to dismiss criminal charges was straightforward.”
Those classified documents were found in a Washington office used by Biden after his term as vice president ended in January 2017, and in collections of his US Senate papers at the University of Delaware.
“The evidence indicates that Mr. Biden did not intentionally withhold these documents and that they could reasonably have been moved to these locations by mistake,” the report said.
Despite that language, Hurr in his report used evidence of Biden’s “bad memory” to further justify his decision not to criminally charge the president.
“We also felt that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during his interview, as a likable, well-intentioned, elderly man with a poor memory,” the special counsel said. in his report.
Hurr’s repeated references to Biden’s memory drew a bitter backlash from the White House and Biden supporters before the president made his televised address.
Biden’s lawyers wrote in a letter to Hurr attached to the report: “We do not believe the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate.”
“The report uses highly biased language to describe a common phenomenon among eyewitnesses: a lack of recollection of events years old,” the lawyers wrote.
Biden, in his remarks Thursday night, said, “For every weird comment, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” referring to Hurr’s remarks about his memory.
“It has no place in this exhibition.”
Biden said he should have personally overseen the transportation of the boxes from his vice presidential office in 2017, as opposed to relying on staff to perform that task.
“I take responsibility for not seeing exactly what my staff did,” he said.
“And so I wish I had paid more attention to how the documents were being transported to where I thought they were going to be, [National] Archives,” he said, referring to the legal repository of government records.
Biden also contrasted his behavior with that of Trump.
“All the things that were in my house were in filing cabinets that were either locked or could be locked,” Biden said. “He was in my house, he was outside and inside [Trump’s private club] Mar-a-Lago in a public space … and none of them were highly classified.”
Biden said he agreed with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint a special counsel to investigate the retention of the documents. In doing so, Garland, who was nominated by Biden to lead the Justice Department, sought to avoid an appearance of conflict that could result from the department itself taking over the investigation.
Hurr was previously the U.S. Attorney for Maryland. He was appointed to this position by Trump.
“I think a special counsel should have been appointed,” Biden said.
“And the reason I think a special counsel had to be appointed is because I didn’t want to be in a position [where] they looked at Trump and they weren’t going to look at me, just like they were looking at [Trump’s] vice president” Mike Pence, who also was not criminally charged for withholding classified documents after a DOJ investigation concluded last June.
“And the fact is that they [Hur] drew a firm conclusion: I did not break the law, period,” Biden said.