'Inaccurate, gratuitous and wrong': White House responds to special counsel’s Biden report

08 February 2024

Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur issued his final 388-page report on Thursday exonerating President Joe Biden from any criminal wrongdoing in his probe into whether Biden mishandled classified documents that were among his personal belongings. However, Hur still made several digs at Biden's age and mental fortitude, which the White House publicly condemned.

Hur — whom former President Donald Trump appointed as US Attorney for the District of Maryland in 2018 — stated that "no criminal charges are warranted in this matter." But he also described Biden as a "sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory," and noted that Biden was unable to remember some of his time as vice president under former President Barack Obama, and other details like the year his son, Beau, passed away.

In a recent tweet, White House spokesperson Ian Sams slammed Hur's characterizations of the president, saying "The inappropriate criticisms of the President’s memory are inaccurate, gratuitous, and wrong."

Sams linked to the Hur report, and invited followers to scroll toward the end, in which a thorough response authored by White House special counsel Richard Sauber, as well as Biden's personal attorney, Bob Bauer, is included as an addendum. The response addresses Hur's assertions point-by-point and asks him to "revisit" his descriptions of Biden's memory "and revise them so that they are stated in a manner that is within the bounds of your expertise and remit."

Sauber and Bauer pointed out that Hur interviewed Biden in the days immediately following Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in which the president was preoccupied with calls to foreign leaders, diplomats and lawmakers. They also suggested it was commonplace for people to have fuzzy recollections of minutiae like dates and times when staffers were packing and moving items between residences after the passage of many years. And they accused Hur of applying a double standard to Biden that they did not apply to other interviewees.

"The same predictable memory loss occurred with other witnesses in this investigation. Yet unlike your treatment of President Biden, your report accepts other witnesses' memory loss as completely understandable given the passage of time," they wrote. "Your treatment of President Biden stands in marked contrast to the lack of pejorative comments about other individuals."

"Not only do you treat the President differently from other witnesses when discussing his limited recall of certain years-ago events, but you also do so on occasions in prejudicial and inflammatory terms," Sauber and Bauer wrote. "It is one thing to observe President Biden's memory as being 'significantly limited' on certain subjects... it is quite another to use the more sweeping and highly prejudicial language included later in the report. This language is not supported by the facts, nor is it appropriately used by a federal prosecutor in this context."

Click here to read Hur's report and the response by Biden's attorneys (beginning on page 384).

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