WASHINGTON — President Biden went ballistic on special counsel Robert Hur for allegedly asking about his son Beau’s death — but a new report said the question never came up during questioning.
The 81-year-old president was defending his cognitive abilities when he ripped Hur during a bellicose press conference Thursday night — but Biden’s memory appears to have failed him again.
“There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that,” Biden fumed Thursday night in a statement to reporters before taking questions. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
Hur’s finding said Biden’s cognitive decline is so perceptible that no jury would convict him of mishandling classified documents stashed in his Delaware home and at a DC office after his vice presidency.
Biden claimed Hur’s team asked him when Beau died during five hours of questioning on Oct. 8-9.
However, NBC News reported Wednesday that the president himself brought up his son’s 2015 death from brain cancer.
“It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden’s death,” two sources familiar with the Biden interview told the outlet.
Joe Biden’s classified documents probe report
- Special counsel Robert Hur determined that President Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” after leaving office as vice president in 2016.
- The records kept by Biden included documents on military and foreign policy in Afghanistan as well as other national security and foreign policy issues.
- Biden kept the classified documents in part to assist with the writing of his memoirs. According to the report, Biden told a ghostwriter in a 2017 conversation that he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”
- Despite the findings, Hur’s 388-page report recommended that the president not face charges.
- The special counsel noted that Biden would likely present himself to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” if he were to face trial.
“Biden raised his son’s death after being asked about his workflow at a Virginia rental home from 2016 to 2018, the sources said, when a ghost writer was helping him write a memoir about losing Beau to brain cancer in 2015,” according to the report.
The White House did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Hur’s nearly 400-page report said that Biden presented himself as confused on many points and should not face criminal charges in part because Biden would likely present himself to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden “did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’),” the report says.
“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died [in May 2015]. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving [2009] memo to President Obama.”
The president ended up compounding questions about his mental fitness when defending himself.
Biden declared during his Thursday evening event that “my memory is fine!” before confusing the presidents of Mexico and Egypt.
Hur’s report came amid a flurry of errors by Biden, including a trio of remarks in the prior week recalling recent conversations with long-retired and deceased leaders of Germany and France.
Biden has for decades been prone to misspeaking — dropping out of his first presidential campaign in 1987 over plagiarism of campaign speeches and a law school paper. He ended up compounding the scandal by exaggerating his academic credentials.
“I exaggerate when I’m angry,” Biden told the New York Times in late 1987, “but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.”
