In a uncommon night tackle, a fired-up President Joe Biden passionately defended his psychological sharpness towards critics, responding to a scathing report on his dealing with of labeled paperwork.
Appearing on reside tv from the White House, Biden was livid over the report’s declare that he was unable to recollect even the date of his son Beau’s loss of life in 2015, in addition to different key moments in his life.
“My memory is fine,” he mentioned.
“There’s even reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden mentioned, visibly preventing to rein in his feelings.
The report from Special Counsel Robert Hur ought to have been good news for Biden.
It cleared him of any legal wrongdoing in his storing of the labeled paperwork, which he’d used whereas Vice President beneath Barack Obama, at his non-public dwelling and a former workplace.
This stands in sharp distinction with a separate legal investigation into Biden’s probably November presidential rival Donald Trump, who’s accused of taking huge portions of top-secret paperwork after leaving the White House in 2021, then obstructing makes an attempt to get them again.
However, Hur unleashed a political bombshell, simply 9 months from the election, by saying the 81-year-old Democrat got here throughout as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Given Biden’s decreased psychological acuity, Hur mentioned, a jury wouldn’t in any case have discovered him responsible on paperwork prices.
Asked about that remark by reporters within the White House after his formal remarks, Biden mentioned: “I am well meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing.”
“I’m president and I put this country back on its feet,” he mentioned. “Take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president.”
Speaker Mike Johnson and different prime Republican leaders of the House of Representatives referred to as Hur’s report “deeply disturbing” and mentioned it confirmed Biden was “unfit” for the presidency.
“A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office,” they mentioned in an announcement.
Hard to dispel
Earlier Thursday, Biden had declared that his exoneration by Hur on any authorized points meant “this matter is now closed.”
However, that clearly was not true – as Biden’s extremely uncommon, last-minute scheduling of televised remarks confirmed.
Biden has lengthy been preventing assaults from the suitable and likewise some inside his personal celebration that he’s too outdated to be president. As he gears up for the November election towards Trump – a person he says poses an existential risk to U.S. democracy – Biden is campaigning on his lengthy expertise and his stewardship of a fast-recovering, post-COVID economic system.
“I’m the most qualified person in the United States to be president and finish the job,” he mentioned within the late-evening remarks.
But it will likely be exhausting to shake the impression of Hur’s stinging feedback.
Biden did not assist himself both by momentarily mixing up Mexico with Egypt whereas answering a reporter’s query about Israel’s struggle in Gaza.
Not ‘correct’ or ‘applicable’
Hur was appointed by Biden’s lawyer basic, Merrick Garland, final yr after labeled materials was discovered on the president’s dwelling in Delaware and in a former workplace.
The 388-page report mentioned Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” within the interval after he left the vice presidency – nicely earlier than he defeated Trump in 2020 to grow to be president.
Hur – beforehand nominated by Trump to be the lead prosecutor for the state of Maryland – mentioned paperwork about navy and overseas coverage in Afghanistan and different issues have been recovered by FBI brokers.
However, “We conclude the evidence is not sufficient to convict, and we decline to recommend prosecution of Mr Biden for his retention of the classified Afghanistan documents,” Hur mentioned.
Hur then mentioned that “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
White House particular counsel Richard Sauber and Biden’s private lawyer Bob Bauer attacked the feedback as neither “accurate or appropriate.”
“The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events,” they mentioned in a letter to Hur. “Such comments have no place in a Department of Justice report.”
The president famous that he had granted 5 hours of interviews to the particular counsel on Oct. 8 and 9, proper as he was dealing with the beginning of the Israel-Palestinian disaster.
Source: www.dailysabah.com