‘DIMINISHED FACULTIES’: Biden Mixes Up Mexico and Egypt in News Conference After Report Questions His Mental State
President Joe Biden gave a tumultuous news conference hours after special counsel Robert Hur released a report Thursday recommending against charging him for retaining classified documents from his years as vice president and senator, in part because the jury would find Biden sympathetic as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and because his “diminished faculties” make it less likely he intentionally violated the law.
During the news conference, Biden claimed that Hur’s comments about his mental state were “extraneous commentary,” and he attempted to allay concerns. Yet the president blamed his staff for the mishandling of classified documents, insisted that his memory was fine but mixed up the countries of Egypt and Mexico and appeared to forget where his son Beau got a set of rosary beads the bereaved father says he highly values.
House Speaker Mike Johnson responded on X, saying the conference proved Biden is not fit to be president.
“The president’s press conference this evening further confirmed on live television what the special counsel report outlined. He is not fit to be president,” Johnson wrote.
In January 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Hur, the U.S. attorney in Maryland appointed by then-President Donald Trump, to investigate Biden’s improper retention of classified documents after he left the Senate in 2009 and the vice presidency in 2017.
The records Biden kept included classified documents regarding military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, along with national security records that implicated “sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” Hur’s report finds.
The special counsel’s report finds a “shortage of evidence” proving that Biden intentionally violated the law and concludes “there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute.” Yet the report also finds that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials.”
An attorney for Biden claimed the classified documents were “unexpectedly discovered” Nov. 2, 2022, at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., and that he immediately notified the National Archives and Records Administration. Biden lawyers later discovered a “small number” of additional classified documents in a storage space in the garage of Biden’s private home in Wilmington, Delaware.
These admissions from Biden’s attorneys came after the FBI opened an investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents in March 2022. Eight months later, Garland appointed former DOJ official Jack Smith to investigate Trump’s retention of classified documents. A grand jury ultimately indicted Trump for his alleged offenses in June 2023.
Hur’s report notes Biden’s willing cooperation with his investigation, saying that cooperation “will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully—that is, with intent to break the law—as the statute requires.”
Hur’s report also takes Biden’s mental state into account on numerous occasions, finding that his “poor memory” and “diminished faculties” make his defenses plausible and would likely endear him to a jury.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the report notes. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
“We also believe some of the same evidence that supports reasonable doubt for the classified Afghanistan documents also supports reasonable doubt for the notebooks, including Mr. Biden’s cooperation with the investigation, his diminished faculties in advancing age, and his sympathetic demeanor,” the special counsel’s report adds. “These factors likely make it difficult for jurors to conclude he had criminal intent.”
The report mentions numerous occasions on which Biden shared sensitive classified information with a ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer.
“For these jurors, Mr. Biden’s apparent lapses and failures in February and April 2017 will likely appear consistent with the diminished faculties and faulty memory he showed in Zwonitzer’s interview recordings and in our interview of him,” the report finds. “Therefore, we conclude that the evidence does not establish that Mr. Biden willfully disclosed national defense information to Zwonitzer.”
Hur’s report notes memory lapses Biden had during an interview with the special counsel’s office.
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” the report notes. “He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’).”
“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” the report adds.
Hur’s report draws a distinction between Biden’s cooperation and Trump’s alleged obstinacy. Referencing Trump’s June 2023 indictment, the report states: “According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it.”
Biden released a statement on the report later Thursday, and the president included similar remarks in a speech to House Democrats.
“I was pleased to see they reached the conclusion I believ