Joe Biden, “a friendly old man with a bad memory”: what the report says about the US President

A report that vindicates Joe Biden on a legal level, but significantly weakens him on a political level. Special Counsel Robert Hur, responsible for investigating the US president’s cover-up of confidential documents, released his findings on Thursday. He does not recommend bringing a case against Joe Biden, but returns several times to the fragility of the 81-year-old head of state, pointing in particular to a “bad memory” that appears to have worsened in recent years.

Joe Biden “knowingly kept and disclosed classified documents during his vice presidency (2009-2017) while he was a private citizen,” he writes in the 388-page report, but believes “the charge would not be frivolous.” , believing, in part, that jurors would give the presumption of innocence to a “sympathetic, well-intentioned elderly man with a poor memory.”

Re-election candidate Joe Biden has already been the target of much criticism and ridicule aimed at his advanced age and the confusion he sometimes displays at suggesting he is not fully in control of his means. The report is proving disastrous on a political level, as he is neck and neck in the polls with his main opponent, Donald Trump, who is even ahead of him in some opinion polls.

“Limited abilities and defective memory”

Some passages from the report deserve special attention. During interviews with US officials, “he could not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview how his term ended and on the second day when his term began (am I still vice president in 2009?)”. He also seemed to have forgotten the death of his son Beau, who died in 2015 from brain cancer. “And his memory seemed fuzzy as he described the debate over Afghanistan that was once so important to him,” the prosecutor wrote.

Robert Goor notes that the memory of the American president appears to have worsened since 2017. He takes as his starting point the interview of the American head of state with his biographer Mark Zwonitzer that year. Conversations “are often very slow: Mr. Biden has difficulty remembering events” and has difficulty reading his own notes. “During the interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” the prosecutor assures.

These interviews with Joe Biden and his biographer are cited several times in the report. The American president is actually accused of revealing secret information to him. But the state of the head of state’s memory will partially exonerate him to the jury, Robert Hur argues: Mr. Biden’s “apparent errors and failures in February and April 2017 are likely to be consistent with the limited abilities and memory defects” he demonstrated. during the interview.

Secret documents left in the garage

Joe Biden is also accused of keeping secret documents at his home, particularly related to the war in Afghanistan, although he did not have the right to do so. They were found in his Delaware home, “in a badly damaged box in the garage,” next to a dog crate, a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape, or even potting soil.

According to Robert Gur, a juror “may conclude that this is not the place where a person deliberately stores what he believes to be secret documents.” It is “rather a place where a person stores secret documents that he has forgotten or whose existence he does not know. »

The report also emphasizes that Joe Biden had the right to possess these documents at the time of their discovery, in 2022, as president. However, he was not allowed to have them in his home from early 2017 (the end of his vice presidency with Barack Obama) until his election to the White House in 2022.

Former President Donald Trump, a candidate for re-election, is also accused of storing confidential documents at his home. He responded to the report in a press release by condemning the “two-tier judicial system.” “The Biden document case is different from mine and 100 times more serious. “I didn’t do anything wrong and cooperated much more with the investigation,” he assured. The prosecutor, however, emphasizes in his report that, unlike Joe Biden, Donald Trump refused to return files he kept after his presidency, even trying to destroy some of them.

Comments “inaccurate and inappropriate”

With the presidential campaign in full swing, Republicans seized the opportunity to attack Joe Biden. “When we don’t have the ability to stand trial (…), we certainly don’t have the ability to be in the Oval Office,” said their House leader, Mike Johnson. “An elderly person with a bad memory does not need to have nuclear codes,” said Kevin Hurn, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma.

The President reacted very sharply to the report. In an additional note, the White House wrote that comments about Joe Biden’s memory “have no place in the DOJ report” and are “neither accurate nor appropriate.” The hesitation in his answers describes “a common phenomenon among witnesses: a lack of memory of events that took place many years ago,” the president said, adding that the interrogations took place the day after October 7, the day of the deadly attack on Hamas. Israel. The American president at that time was in the process of resolving an international crisis, which explains Joe Biden’s inaccuracies, the note shows.

“I mean good things, I’m an old man and I know what the hell I’m doing (…) I don’t have memory problems,” Joe Biden responded angrily during a speech on Thursday. Recall that his doctor described him as “healthy” in a very detailed report published a year ago. But on Thursday, shortly after his initial statements, the American president misspelled the name of a foreign leader when referring to “Mexican President Sissi” when he actually meant to refer to Egyptian head of state Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. Last weekend he already mentioned a conversation he would have in 2021 during the G7 summit with President Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996.