President with gaps in memory
Report on secret documents exonerates Biden
March 12, 2024, 9:31 p.m
Investigators discover old secret documents in Biden’s house. Special Counsel Robert Hur interviews the President in October 2023 and questions his memory. His final report at least exonerates Biden legally. Both Republicans and Democrats are outraged.
The US Congress has dealt with the affair surrounding secret documents found in the house and a former office of President Joe Biden. Special counsel Robert Hur, who described the 81-year-old president as having a “foggy,” “fuzzy,” “flawed” and “poor” memory during his investigation into the case, defended that assessment in an election-year hearing in the House of Representatives that highlighted the rifts between revealed to the Democrats and the Republicans.
Shortly before the questioning, a transcript of Hur’s interviews with Biden, which lasted more than five hours, was published, in which the President was unable to specifically name at least some dates and other details. But Biden emphasized that he never intentionally wanted to keep secret documents. Hur therefore concluded in his report in February that no criminal charges were warranted after the discovery of secret documents from Biden’s time as vice president under Barack Obama. However, the special investigator’s statements about Biden’s mental state fueled the debate in the election year about the 81-year-old Biden’s suitability for the highest office of the state.
“What I wrote was consistent with what I thought the evidence showed and what I thought the jury would perceive and accept,” Hur said at the hearing. His assessment in the report of the importance of the president’s memory was necessary, correct and fair. “I didn’t censor my statement. And I didn’t unfairly badmouth the president either.”
Special prosecutor upsets both parties
The now published transcript of Hur’s conversations with Biden could provide further insights. The 81-year-old was unable to provide some details, but whether this really represented “significant limitations” in his memory, as Hur described it, is at least questionable. At the same time, it also becomes clear that Hur did not investigate the death of Biden’s son, as the President had portrayed.
Special Counsel Robert Hur presented his report to the US Congress.
(Photo: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire)
With his report, Hur angered both Republicans because he did not indict Biden and Democrats who chafed at his portrayal of Biden. Biden’s party portrayed the Republican Hur as a party soldier who wanted to enable his own candidate to defeat Biden in the presidential election in the fall. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Republican Jim Jordan, said at the start of the hearing that Biden had simply kept secret information, not secured it and passed it on to unauthorized persons. “Joe Biden broke the law because he is a forgetful old man who a jury would feel sorry for.”
Republicans complained that Biden was given a free pass by his Justice Department, but his predecessor Trump was treated unfairly by prosecutors in a similar case. The Democrats, however, pointed out the differences between the two cases. Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler asked Hur whether Biden’s willingness to cooperate with the investigation and his voluntary handover of the documents contributed to the decision not to indict him. “That was a factor in our analysis,” the special prosecutor confirmed.
Trump sees himself as a victim
In 2022, FBI agents searched Trump’s private property in Florida and uncovered boxes full of documents, some of which were marked as secret. According to the indictment, the ex-president had previously resisted several requests from the National Archives to return the documents. Still, Trump called Tuesday’s hearing a “big day for the Biden Democrats’ hoax” – and himself a victim who was being unfairly targeted.
In interviews, Biden repeatedly told prosecutors that he had no idea how the confidential documents ended up in his home and in a Washington think tank office he previously used. If he had known about these documents, he would have returned them to the government, he emphasized. At the same time, Biden admitted that he had deliberately kept diaries in which, according to investigators, classified information was found. The president explained that it was his property to which he had the right to access.
Incidentally, over the course of his more than 50 years in public service, he has accumulated so many photos, documents and artifacts that he has lost track. When investigators asked whether First Lady Jill Biden filed her documents with his, Biden replied: “She doesn’t want anything to do with my file filing system.”