The special counsel is scheduled to testify about the Biden investigation
The Implications of the indictment of B.C. Biden for the prosecution of Donald J. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents
While the central allegations of the impeachment push aren’t related to Hur’s testimony, his appearance is still likely to be used to emphasize the lawmakers’ concerns over Biden’s fitness for office.
The evidence did not prove the guilt of Biden beyond a reasonable doubt. He said Biden would come across as a person with a poor memory, that he had trouble remembering timelines and details, and that it would be hard for a jury to convict him.
Hur asked Biden to try his hardest to recall details. “I acknowledge that some of the questions we are asking relate to events that happened years ago,” Hur said. Biden replied: “I’m a young man, so it’s not a problem.”
Republicans seized upon the description of Biden as an opportunity to raise questions about the president’s mental acuity. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other senior Republicans, for example, said that “a man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.”
The statement that the decision not to charge Biden was evidence of a two-tiered system of justice was made by Johnson and his fellow GOP leaders in the House.
Trump is facing a separate investigation, led by special counsel Jack Smith, into his own alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the presidency. boxes of classified materials were found at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, and Trump was indicted on more than 30 federal criminal charges.
The Biden and Trump cases both involve classified materials. In Biden’s case, his attorneys promptly returned the records after discovering them. Trump, meanwhile, is accused of willfully keeping the classified documents and then actively trying to obstruct Justice Department efforts to get them back.
“Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts.”
The investigation, led by Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and James Comer, R-Ky., has continued for months without producing any direct evidence that Biden was involved in any of his family’s foreign business dealings.
At one point, Biden became aware that he was going on too long with one of his favorite stories, saying, “to make a long story not quite so long…” and then he kept on going.
The interview also included Biden going on at length about the decision-making process around the troop surge in Afghanistan in 2009, his decision in the early 1970s to become a public defender, his decision to run for office the first time, his family meeting where the grandkids convinced him to run for president in 2019 – and this one time he used a bow and arrow to hit a target during a trip to Mongolia.
“I don’t know,” Biden said. It was one of the many times Biden told Hur he didn’t know – about things mundane (why he wasn’t using the hanging folders in his file cabinet in Wilmington) to procedural (what his staff did with highly classified materials when he was done with them.)
At another point in the interview, Biden went into great detail about his home in Wilmington – so much detail that there were numerous redactions in the transcript by the U.S. Secret Service. Biden described himself as frustrated as he went through a lot of details about designing and decorating a home.
“I’m not arguing about that right now, Mr. President,” Krickbaum said. “I just want to make sure we are on the same page,” Biden replied, before they moved on.
“Every president before me has done the same exact thing,” Biden said. Biden had talked about how former President Ronald Reagan had kept his personal notes. The precedent Biden and his legal team used to explain why he kept notebooks with summaries of classified material was a previous precedent.
Biden kept a lot of handwritten notes, but did he have the authority to have notebooks full of them? “Do you think those are yours?” Krickbaum asked.
The president was adamant in his answer that Biden never kept her files with him. “She wanted nothing to do with my filing system,” he said.
Biden had a difficult time remembering when and how certain boxes appeared in his cluttered garage, and how photographs from Hur’s report showed them.
What month did Beau die? Oh God, May 30,” Biden said, according to the transcript. An attorney from the White House Counsel’s office said ” 2015,” after a speaker said something along the same lines.
But Biden went further back in time, and began talking about the death of his son, Beau, from cancer, just as Biden was trying to decide whether to run for president. There were still people encouraging me to run when I left the Senate because my son is either deployed or dying, but the president was against it at the time.
They discussed Biden’s work after he left office, including his “cancer moonshot” push to find cures and treatments for the disease, as well as writing a book.
The first interview at the White House began at 12:14PM on Oct 8, following the attacks in Israel. Hur thanked Biden for making time for it. Biden had just left the phone with Netanyahu.
He also said some combination of “I don’t know,””I don’t recall,” “I don’t specifically remember,” “I have no goddamn idea” and similar phrases more than 100 times during the deposition for a special counsel review of his handling of classified documents after he left office in 2017, according to an NPR review of the transcript.
During more than five hours of interviews over two days last October, President Biden cracked jokes, went into great detail about the design of his Wilmington home and spoke with confidence about world events from more than a decade ago. At times, he was defiant.
