President Joe Biden struggled to remember key dates and said he was unfamiliar with how classified documents ended up in his possession, according to a transcript of his hourslong interview with then-special counsel Robert Hur.
The transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden, reviewed by the Washington Examiner, is part of a wider report released in February that concluded Biden should not be criminally charged for his mishandling of classified documents, in part because of the president’s age. One reason Hur said he did not recommend charges was because Biden’s memory was “significantly limited” and he would come across to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The report detailed how the president had forgotten the year when his son Beau Biden died, a finding reaffirmed in the transcript. Biden also appeared not to remember when he left the vice presidency.
“My problem was I never knew where any of the documents of boxes were specifically coming from or who packed them,” Biden said, according to the transcript. “Just did I get them delivered to me. And so this is — I’m, at this stage, in 2009, am I still vice president?”
Biden broached the topic of Beau, who died in 2015, while he was talking about the year 2017, saying, “In this timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying.”
In the hours after Hur released his special counsel report, Biden appeared incredulous to reporters as he claimed the special counsel had brought up the topic of his late son, a comment that the transcript revealed to be false.
“How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself: It wasn’t any of their damn business,” Biden told reporters.
Hur’s report came at the conclusion of a yearlong investigation into the classified documents in Biden’s possession, and part of the investigation involved interviewing Biden over two days last October.
The transcript also revealed that the interview was relatively light-hearted, and Biden cracked jokes at times, including right at the start, when he responded to Hur asking the president to recall details to the best of his ability.
“I’m a young man, so it’s not a problem,” Biden quipped.
As Hur asked Biden about bringing classified material from his office to his Wilmington home when he was vice president, Biden noted how federal investigators had searched through all of the documents there.
“I just hope you didn’t find any risque pictures of my wife in a bathing suit. Which you probably did. She’s beautiful,” Biden said with laughter.
The transcript comes on the same day Hur is expected to testify before Congress about his report. Both Republicans and Democrats, albeit for different political purposes, are likely to contrast his findings with those of special counsel Jack Smith, who recommended criminal charges for former President Donald Trump for his own handling of classified documents.
In prepared testimony, Hur planned to stand by his assessment of Biden’s mental acuity as “accurate and fair.”
“What I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe,” Hur will say. “I did not sanitize my explanation, nor did I disparage the president unfairly.”
Biden was also found to have retained, among boxes of documents, classified information on U.S. policy in Afghanistan from his time as vice president. Hur observed in his report that those documents represented “seminal moments” from Biden’s time in office.
In the interviews, Biden was asked about evidence that he held on to classified information, such as documents on Afghanistan. When asked if there were memos about Afghanistan that he kept following his vice presidency, Biden said, “Not knowingly.”
“I mean, it wasn’t anything I consciously — there may have been something that was kept in a notebook or something, but not conscious,” the president continued.
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He also said he had “no idea” where staff secured classified documents and did not know what was in certain filings that were moved from one home to another. He could not recall how many times he had been in and out of areas that held classified documents and where notes on things such as foreign policy had been kept.
“I have no idea. I wish I could say I was more organized,” Biden said to Hur, according to the interviews. “I’m being deadly earnest.”
