9 months ago
A fiery President Joe Biden on Thursday night defended his mental capacity for the job and angrily questioned why the special counsel would write in his report that he couldn’t recall when his son Beau died.
“I don’t need anyone, anyone, to remind me when he passed away,” Biden said of the special counsel. “How the hell dare he raise that.”
“Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, was it any of their damn business?” the president said in quickly organized remarks Thursday night to reporters from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House.
“The simple truth is that I sat for five hours, two days, over events going back 40 years. At the same time I was managing a national crisis,” he said of his sit down with Special Counsel Robert Hur, the author of the damning report.
Biden insisted his memory is “fine” and stressed he did not break the law in his handling of classified information from his time as vice president.
“I've seen headlines since the report was released about my willful retention of documents. This assertion is not only misleading, it’s just plain wrong,” Biden said.
His comments came hours after the release of a special counsel report on his handling of classified documents. That report concluded that no criminal charges were warranted but did so, in large part, by saying a jury would be sympathetic to Biden for having a poor memory. Biden traveled to a retreat of House Democrats on Thursday afternoon and claimed exoneration. But a person familiar with his remarks but not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations, said that he was privately livid over the Hur report.
White House officials were angered by the special counsel report, believing that Hur far exceeded his purview with comments about Biden's memory. Two senior officials, not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations, believed Hur should have stuck to the task of determining wrongdoing or not, drawing references to how former FBI director James Comey cleared Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing during the 2016 campaign but still delivered a scathing assessment of her behavior in a public press conference.
At his press conference, Biden showed some of that anger he’d exhibited privately earlier. He went after the press for, in his estimation, pushing the idea that he was mentally not up to the task. He declined to entertain the idea that he should step aside as the prohibitive Democratic favorite to take on Donald Trump, saying he had the best qualifications for the post of president.
English (US)