An interview with Biden during his time with the New Hampshire Democrat-Democrat Corrigendum on the Imminence of Donald J. Biden
The testimony of Hur is likely to help the party highlight concerns over Biden’s fitness for office, even though the central allegations of the impeachment push are not related to him.
Hur concluded that criminal charges were not warranted because the evidence did not establish Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. He said it would be difficult to convince a jury that Biden was guilty of a serious felony, as he would come across as apathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.
Biden was asked to remember more details by Hur. The events that happened years ago are what some of the questions relate to. Biden replied: “I’m a young man, so it’s not a problem.”
Republicans, meanwhile, seized on the description of Biden 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 GOP leaders in the House claimed that the decision not to charge Biden was evidence of a two-tiered justice system, just like the claim that the president made without evidence.
Trump is facing a separate investigation, led by special counsel Jack Smith, into his own alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the presidency. Trump was indicted on more than three dozen federal criminal charges after boxes of classified materials were found at his home in Florida.
Although the Biden and Trump cases both involve classified materials, there are significant differences between them. After discovering the records, Biden’s attorneys quickly returned them. Trump, meanwhile, is accused of willfully keeping the classified documents and then actively trying to obstruct Justice Department efforts to get them back.
The allegations in the indictment of Mr. Trump would present serious facts, which is unlike the evidence relating to Mr. Biden.
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.
Biden was aware at one point that he was going on too long with one of his favorite stories, and so he kept on going.
The interview showed Biden describing the decision-making process in regards to the troop surge in Afghanistan, and his decision to become a public defender in the early 1970s when his children persuaded him to run for president.
“I don’t know,” Biden replied. 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 one point in the interview there was a lot of detail about Biden’s home in Wilmington that was not contained in the transcript. Biden described himself as a “frustrated architect” as he went through minutiae about the home he helped design and decorate.
“I’m not arguing with you 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. Earlier in the conversation, Biden had described how former President Ronald Reagan had held onto his personal notes and diaries. It was a precedent Biden and his legal team have leaned on to explain why he kept notebooks that could have contained summaries of classified briefing materials.
Krickbaum attempted to ask Biden about whether he was authorized to have notebooks he kept full of handwritten notes about events and items he was briefed on. “Do you view those as yours?” Krickbaum asked.
The president made it very clear that he never stored Biden’s files with him. “She wanted nothing to do with my filing system,” he said.
When attempting to explain when certain boxes appeared in his cluttered garage, Biden had a hard time remembering which pictures appeared in Hur’s report.
“And so what was happening, though – 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:” and the speaker sounded like another person.
Just as Biden was deciding whether to run for president, he began to talk about his son’s death from cancer. When I left the Senate, there were still a lot of people who encouraged me to run in this period, but the president was the only one who wanted me to run.
They discussed the nature of his work after he left office, work that included Biden’s “cancer moonshot” push to find cures and treatments for the disease – and writing a book.
The first interview began at the White House at 12:15 PM on Oct. 8, the day after the deadly Hamas attacks in Israel. Hur thanked Biden for being available. Biden said he got off the phone with Netanyahu.
He used a number of phrases including “I have no idea” and “I don’t remember” when he was deposed for a review of his handling of classified documents.
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. He was defiant at times.