‘I Did Not Sanitize’: Special Counsel Defends Report Calling Out Biden’s Memory Problems in Congressional Testimony

Special counsel Robert Hur defended on Tuesday the observations he made about President Joe Biden’s memory in his final report on the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified materials.

Ahead of his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Hur delivered an opening statement addressing criticisms of his decision to comment on Biden’s apparent memory lapses in his report, explaining that the commentary was necessary to explain why he didn’t believe Biden should be charged with willfully retaining classified documents, even though he had determined that the president did in fact knowingly retain such material.

“There has been a lot of attention paid to language in the report about the President’s memory, so let me say a few words about that. My task was to determine whether the President retained or disclosed national defense information ‘willfully’—meaning, knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids. I could not make that determination without assessing the President’s state of mind,” Hur said.

“For that reason, I had to consider the President’s memory and overall mental state, and how a jury likely would perceive his memory and mental state in a criminal trial. These are the types of issues prosecutors analyze every day.”

Joe Biden’s memory was an important consideration for Hur’s decision not to pursue criminal charges against the sitting president, Hur testified. While Hur did find evidence Biden “willfully” retained classified information about foreign policy and national-security issues, the special counsel did not assess that it would be provable beyond a reasonable doubt and predicted that a prosecutor would have trouble convincing a jury to convict given Biden’s advanced age and addled memory.

“My assessment in the report about the relevance of the President’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair. Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe. I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the President unfairly,” Hur said.

Most notably, Hur’s report asserts that Biden struggled to recall the exact year his late son, Beau Biden, passed away. A transcript of the Biden interview reviewed by National Review shows Hur did not directly ask Biden about his son, contrary to what the president suggested during his primetime press conference addressing the fallout from Hur’s report.

“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden said at the press conference. At one point during the angry press conference, Biden confused the presidents of Egypt and Mexico.

Biden discussed Beau’s death when Hur was pressing him on keeping papers from his vice presidency, the transcript shows.

“Remember, in this time frame, my son is — either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was — and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period,” Biden said in response to a question from Hur about why he kept documents related to his think tank and cancer initiative. He was describing how he was being pushed to run for president in the 2016 Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton soon after Beau Biden passed away.

“I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for president. And, and so what was happening, though — what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30,” he continued.

“Was it 2015 he had died?” Biden subsequently asked, the transcript shows. He also wondered when Former President Donald Trump was elected, and mistakenly said it was in November of 2017 instead of November 2016.

Hur’s opening statement touched on parts of the interview he conducted with Biden during the classified-documents investigation. When Hur and his team interviewed Biden, he could not recall telling his ghostwriter “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” a comment Biden made on tape after his vice presidency.

In addition, Biden said he could not recall finding classified materials at his home or retaining anything related to Afghanistan from his vice presidency. Hur’s report details how FBI agents discovered classified information at Biden’s Delaware residence and other locations.

A son of Korean immigrants, Hur spent the majority of his legal career serving in the Justice Department. He was a U.S. Attorney and a Principal Deputy Attorney General before Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed him special counsel for the Biden classified documents probe.