The decision on Thursday not to file criminal charges against President Biden for mishandling classified documents should have been an unequivocal legal exoneration.
Instead, it was a political disaster.
The investigation into Mr. Biden’s handling of the documents after being vice president concluded that he was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and had “diminished faculties in advancing age” — such startling assertions that they prompted a fiery and emotional attempt at political damage control from the president within hours.
Speaking to the cameras from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House, Mr. Biden on Thursday evening blasted the report by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel, accusing the report’s authors of “extraneous commentary” about his age and mental capacity.
“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” the president said flatly.
Mr. Biden appeared to take special exception to the report’s assertion that during interviews with F.B.I. investigators, he could not recall what year his son Beau died.
“How the hell dare he raise that,” the president said, appearing to choke back tears. “Every Memorial Day we hold a service remembering him attended by friends and family and the people who loved him. I don’t need anyone, I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.”
The president’s remarkable appearance before reporters underscored the political damage that Mr. Hur’s report could do despite the lack of criminal charges. The report’s discussion of the president’s memory and age was repeated throughout the 345-page document, and was quickly seized on by Republicans, including Mr. Biden’s likely opponent in the 2024 election, former President Donald J. Trump.
In the report, Mr. Hur said the memory of the then-80-year-old president was so hazy during five hours of interviews over two days that it would be difficult to convince jurors that Mr. Biden knew his handling of the documents was wrong. Mr. Hur predicted in the report that if the president were charged, his lawyers “would emphasize these limitations in his recall.”
In part because of Mr. Biden’s memory, Mr. Hur declined to recommend charging the president for what the report described as willful retention of national security secrets, including some documents shared by the president that implicated “sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his 80s — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” Mr. Hur wrote.
In his own written statement issued just after the report became public, Mr. Biden appeared to suggest a reason for why he was distracted.
“I was so determined to give the special counsel what they needed that I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on Oct. 8 and 9 of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on Oct. 7 and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis,” he wrote. “I just believed that’s what I owed the American people.”
The president’s lawyers, Bob Bauer and Richard Sauber, took exception in a Feb. 5 letter with Mr. Hur’s description of the president’s memory.
“It is hardly fair to concede that the president would be asked about events years in the past, press him to give his ‘best’ recollections and then fault him for his limited memory,” the lawyers wrote. “The president’s inability to recall dates or details of events that happened years ago is neither surprising nor unusual.”
Concerns about Mr. Biden’s age have been a recurring theme of his presidency over the past three years. Fueled in part by video of the president appearing weak or stumbling in public, many voters have expressed concern about his mental and physical fitness as he seeks to remain in the White House until he is 86 years old.
Mr. Biden has tried to laugh off the…
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