Taking a cue from the White House, senators are casting the report’s devastating characterization of Biden’s mental acuity as a politically motivated hit job.
Senate Democrats are dismissing the report released on Thursday by special counsel Robert Hur, who declined to charge President Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents while serving as vice president but called him an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
Taking a cue from the White House, Democratic senators are casting the report’s devastating characterization of the 81-year-old incumbent’s memory and mental acuity as a politically motivated hit job from a Trump-appointed former U.S. attorney, even though Hur was tapped by the White House’s own attorney general, Merrick Garland.
“A Republican saying that Joe Biden is old is not exactly newsworthy,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii. Pressed on the various lapses in memory that Hur mentioned in the report, Schatz responded with a question to NR: “Have you ever heard of a special counsel editorializing like this?”
Democratic senators sought to deflect questions about the report by drawing contrasts between Biden and former president Donald Trump, Republicans’ likely 2024 nominee, who is dogged by legal troubles of his own and who has had his fair share of verbal slip-ups on the stump in recent months, including mixing up former House speaker Nancy Pelosi with his GOP rival Nikki Haley and calling Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán the “leader of Turkey.”
“It was just cheap trash,” Democratic senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania said Friday evening of the special-counsel report. “It really doesn’t change anything right now because it’s going to be the same choice” between Biden and Trump in November, he added.
Other responses were more cryptic. “I haven’t even caught up on all of it, but I think the president is doing a good job on many fronts — many of them complex that most people understand his willingness to communicate those issues,” Washington senator Maria Cantwell said to NR.
The report found that Biden willfully retained classified documents and disclosed classified information. But the special counsel report did not recommend charging Biden for mishandling classified documents in part because, in Hur’s view, “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
For Republicans, the special-counsel report is “a double whammy,” said Republican senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska, in a brief interview in the U.S. Capitol Friday evening. “It’s a combination of two tiers of justice, right? It’s hard to explain how he gets a pass when it was purposeful and Trump doesn’t, and then the obvious frailties that are reported about his age.”
For Democrats, Hur’s characterizations of Biden’s poor memory were beyond the purview of his role as special counsel. “As a former prosecutor, I would never make that kind of statement in a report,” said Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. “Either you bring charges or you say there is insufficient evidence to prove the elements of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. But to make a gratuitous comment on someone’s age or memory, I think, is really out of bounds.”
During the impromptu news conference with the White House press corps on Thursday evening, a reporter pressed Biden on the report’s “poor memory” line. The president shot back: “I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been president and I put this country back on its feet.”
The report said Biden could not recall “even within several years” when his elder son, Beau, died, adding that his “memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.” According to Hur’s investigation, Biden also struggled to recall during separate interviews when his period as vice president began and when it ended.
The headlines following Thursday evening’s hastily scheduled and combative press conference, clearly intended to assuage concerns about the president’s memory, only added insult to injury. Biden told reporters about a meeting he had with Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, but called him “president of Mexico, Sisi.” And pushing back angrily against Hur’s characterization of Biden’s memory with respect to the death of his son, the president struggled to recall the name of the parish where he got the rosary he wears in remembrance of him.
Making matters worse, Thursday’s disastrous press conference followed a number of gaffes earlier in the week, when the president mistook two European leaders for their dead predecessors. On one occasion, Biden said he’d spoken at a G-7 meeting in 2021 with former French president François Mitterrand, who died in 1996, apparently confusing him with current French president Emmanuel Macron. On another occasion, he said he’d spoken at that same meeting with former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, apparently confusing him with former German chancellor Angela Merkel.
For months now, Democrats have urged the White House to put Biden in front of the camera more often to alleviate voters’ long-running concerns about his age. They say Biden is too reliant on a teleprompter and too media-averse, conducting far fewer press conferences than his predecessors and avoiding sit-down interviews with reporters like the plague. Just this week, he turned down for the second year in a row an interview that would have aired during the Super Bowl, one of the easiest ways for a president to communicate with voters during an election year.
And it’s not just voters who are concerned about his age and fitness. As National Review reported in December, a handful of House Democrats who rarely interact with the president were alarmed by his physical state after seeing him up close at White House holiday parties. Behind closed doors and in hushed tones, some of them privately question whether Biden can “make it” to Election Day.
Throughout Biden’s presidency, most Democrats have avoided talking about the president’s age, or describe the issue as old news and already baked in for voters. Democratic strategist David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, says this approach is tone deaf. Axelrod has long insisted that the Biden campaign must do more to acknowledge voters’ concerns about the fact that, if reelected, the president would by 86 years old by the end of his second term.
“Occasionally he’ll make a joke about it. But I’m not sure people think it’s a joking matter. And in order to get a hearing from people you need to dignify their concerns,” Axelrod told National Review last month. “They need to figure out how to talk about it openly.”
After Thursday’s report, the White House may have no choice but to heed this advice.