Biden was ‘painfully slow’ in Justice Department interviews and ‘tense about reading his own NOTEBOOK’
Joe Biden was “painfully slow” during interviews with Justice Department investigators as he battled a failing memory, according to a damning report into his mishandling of sensitive documents.
A special prosecutor recommended that Biden not be charged over documents found at his home and office.
But Robert Hur’s 388-page report provides a raft of evidence to the president’s opponents, who say that at age 81 he does not have the mental capacity to be re-elected in November.
It describes how hours of recording with his ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer showed him struggling to remember details.
‘Mr. “Biden’s memory also appeared to have significant limitations – both when he spoke with Zwonitzer in 2017, as evidenced by their recorded conversations, and today, as evidenced by his recorded interview with our office,” the report said.
Joe Biden was “painfully slow” during interviews with Justice Department investigators as he battled a failing memory, according to a damning report into his mishandling of sensitive documents.
President Joe Biden will not be criminally charged with stashing classified documents in his garage and private office
‘Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to recall events and sometimes having to read and relay his own notes in his notebook.”
Zwonitzer collaborated with then-former Vice President Biden on his memoir “Promise Me, Dad.”
Sometimes Biden read from his handwritten notes, taken from internal White House briefings.
Some of this posed a risk to national security, the report said.
‘Mr. “Biden clearly wrote down sensitive information that was discussed during intelligence briefings with President Obama and meetings in the White House Situation Room on national security, military and foreign policy issues,” it said.
“And as he read the notes in his notebook aloud during meetings with his ghostwriter, Mr. Biden sometimes skipped over suspected classified material and warned his ghostwriter that the notes might be classified, but at least three times Mr. Biden read aloud almost three times for his ghostwriter. verbatim.’
Biden came into the spotlight after his predecessor Donald Trump was accused of illegally keeping classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago home.
Hur spent a year doing research. His report is likely to undermine the Biden campaign’s efforts to use the charges against Trump in the 2024 election.
Instead, there is ample ammunition for Trump, with a series of revelations about Biden’s mental acuity.
Department of Justice photos show boxes and boxes of files stored in unsafe locations, such as the garage of his home.
It describes his inability to remember important dates in his career and personal life when interviewed by investigators.
‘He couldn’t remember when he was vice president, forgot on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did I stop being vice president?”), and forgot on the second day of the interview as his term began (“Am I still vice president in 2009?”), he reportedly said.
“He didn’t even remember his son Beau dying within a few years.”
He was also apparently hazy about the debate over withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, which was such a key part of the early months of his presidency.
“We also expect that many jurors will be struck by where the Afghan documents were ultimately found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape, potting soil and synthetic firewood,” the report concludes.
The long-awaited report will provide ammunition for critics who say Biden is too old to be president. It describes frequent memory loss
The report is chock full of photos of documents recovered from Biden’s home or an office he used when he was vice president
The box circled in the foreground contained documents about Afghanistan. The photo was taken in Biden’s garage in December 2022, along with other household items
The details of the report fade from Biden’s memory, both in conversations with his ghostwriter and with investigators. The conclusion is that jurors may have thought he made an innocent mistake
Photos in the report show some of the secret Afghanistan documents, showing how they were apparently stored with other household items, including a ladder and a wicker basket.
The material included notebooks with handwritten notes “implying sensitive intelligence sources and methods” taken from White House briefings.
The investigation found that there was sufficient evidence to indicate that Biden was aware that he was not allowed to keep such classified notes after he left office, noting that his long career in Washington meant he was familiar “with the measures taken to protect classified information and measures are needed to prevent damage to national security.’
Yet notebooks full of classified information were kept in unlocked drawers at his home.
And it wasn’t just that the notebooks were lost and forgotten.
“He consulted the notebooks liberally during hours of conversations with his ghostwriter and regarded them as deeply personal and valuable possessions that he was unwilling to part with,” Hur writes.
Biden said he was pleased no charges would be filed and declared the case closed.
Special counsel Robert Hur spent a year investigating files found in President Joe Biden’s home and former office. He said Biden’s status as president meant he could not be prosecuted
“I have fully cooperated, put up no roadblocks and sought no delay,” he said.
“In fact, I was so determined to get the special counsel what they needed that on October 8 and 9 last year I did five hours of in-person interviews over two days, even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7. and I was in the middle of dealing with an international crisis.”
White House spokesman Ian Sams said the report paints a misleading picture of the president’s memory.
“The inappropriate criticism of the president’s memory is inaccurate, unnecessary and wrong,” he said. “We told this to the special counsel.”
For his part, Trump said the findings showed he was wrongly targeted for prosecution in a two-tier system.
“The Biden Documents case is a hundred times different and more serious than mine,” he said in an emailed statement. I didn’t do anything wrong and I was much more cooperative.
“What Biden did is outrageously criminal – he had 50 years of documents, 50 times more than I do, and he ‘MUCH KEPT’ them.”
Hur’s investigation was separate from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump after he left the White House. Smith alleges that Trump illegally kept classified documents in his home and then obstructed efforts to recover them.
Trump denies all allegations.
In Biden’s case, officials contacted the National Archives to return documents when they were found at his former office. The FBI was notified and an investigation was opened.
Hur said Biden could not be prosecuted as a sitting president.
“We would reach the same conclusion even if Justice Department policy did not preclude criminal charges against a sitting president,” his report said.
Critics of Biden pointed out how the Justice Department bought into the idea of jurors giving Biden space like a forgetful old man.
“If you’re too senile to stand trial, then you’re too senile to be president,” said Alex Pfeiffer of the Trump-supporting political action committee Make America Great Again. “Joe Biden is unfit to lead this nation.”