It was one of the more dramatic moments of Biden’s press conference last week. An angry president responded to the allegation in Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents that he couldn’t recall, “even within several years when his son Beau died.”
“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden told reporters in an impromptu White House press conference. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
Except Biden was never asked a question about the date of his son’s death. It was Biden who raised the issue first.
Biden raised his son’s death after being asked about his workflow at a Virginia rental home from 2016 to 2018, the sources said, when a ghost writer was helping him write a memoir about losing Beau to brain cancer in 2015. Investigators had a 2017 recording showing that Biden had told the ghost writer he had found “classified stuff” in that home, the report says.
Biden began trying to recall that period by discussing what else was happening in his life, and it was at that point in the interview that he appeared confused about when Beau died, the sources said. Biden got the date — May 30 — correct, but not the year.
Biden’s surrogates attacked Hur viciously for something he never did.
“Why in the hell are you asking that question?” former Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday on MSNBC. He suggested that Hur was “a rube, perhaps,” who had “shaded” what he put in the report. “What does that have to do with the retention of classified documents?”
Holder should be thanking Hur for adding the memory issues to the report. Otherwise, Biden might be in cuffs doing a perp walk into the D.C. jail. It was Hur’s characterization of Biden as “forgetful” and a “nice old man,” which he cited as a reason a jury wouldn’t convict Biden.
Those memory lapses were “one reason he [Hur] concluded that it would be difficult to convince a jury to convict Biden of intentionally mishandling classified information,” states NBC News. Hur said that Biden would come off as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” to any jury, which is why he recommended not prosecuting the president even though there’s proof that he deliberately and knowingly took classified documents and failed to return them.
First Lady Jill Biden questioned in a fundraising letter whether Hur was using “our son’s death to score political points,” according to NBC News. Using her own stepson’s death to fundraise is worse than anything Hur didn’t do.
Two people who know Hur well said that he had set out to write a balanced and thorough narrative that would explain why, despite significant evidence, he had concluded that no criminal charges would be warranted for Biden. Over the course of a yearlong investigation, Hur’s team examined 7 million documents and spoke with 147 witnesses, according to his report.
Associates of Hur say that Biden’s claim that the special counsel quizzed the president, unprompted, about his son’s death from cancer is an effort to take the focus off the special counsel’s findings regarding how Biden handled classified documents and his struggle to recall certain facts.
It was Biden who voluntarily brought up his son’s death. Hur wasn’t trying to unnerve Biden at all. The report also went into Biden’s loss of memory during 20 hours of interviews with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer. At least three times, Biden read aloud passages from classified documents to Zwonizter. Sharing classified information is a crime as well.
The bottom line is that Biden should be in a lot more trouble than he ended up in, proving that the legal double standard is alive and well in Washington.