Newly released audio of a special counsel interviewing then-President joe Biden confirms memory lapses that White House officials denied at the time, including a president clearly struggling to remember the year his oldest son died.
Even after the transcript was released, Biden aides, including then-White House spokesman Ian Sams, insisted that the president did not forget the year that his son Beau died of brain cancer. The audio shows that Biden struggled to remember the year and had to be prompted by his lawyers, who were sitting in the interview with him.
The recording of the interview was first released by Axios.
Sams did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur is likely to fuel a growing debate among Democrats and others about whether there was a concerted effort to cover up the president’s diminished mental capacity, as well as whether that contributed to the party’s 2024 defeat at the polls. It also comes as several new books offer insight into what many behind the scenes knew.
Biden sat for more than five hours of interviews over two days in October 2023 as part of Hur’s investigation into Biden’s retention of classified documents at his home and office from his time as vice president. Hur later cited interviews in which he described Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” in his final report at the end of his investigation.
Donald Trump and his Republican allies seized on Hur’s description of Biden and demanded the audio of his interviews be released.
Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland released the transcript of Biden’s interviews, but not the audio. Garland said at the time that the audio was covered by executive privilege, and the White House did not want it released.
Republicans held Garland in contempt of Congress over his refusal to turn over the audio.
News organizations, including NBC News, filed a lawsuit seeking any recordings of Biden’s interviews, and the issue was not resolved before Biden left office.
About a month after Trump took office, the Justice Department asked the court for more time to consider the issue because the new administration’s “leadership is still in the process of being installed” in the department, according to a court filing.
The judge agreed to an extension and ordered Justice Department attorneys to file an update on the status of the case by May 20.
Hur, who was tapped by Garland to conduct a criminal investigation after classified documents were found in Biden’s home and office, concluded there was evidence that Biden willfully retained classified information — a felony. But Hur said he did not believe he could win a conviction, in part because of Biden’s faltering memory.
“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,” Hur wrote in his report.
Biden’s lawyers at the time aggressively pushed back on that description, arguing that he performed well in a difficult interview and suffered the same sorts of memory lapses that witnesses often do. Biden’s aides and senior Democrats excoriated Hur for including such a description in a report where no charges were brought.
Months later, Hur’s assessment of Biden was validated by his disastrous performance during a debate with Trump. Biden struggled to complete thoughts and sentences throughout the debate, which led to his exit from the 2024 race weeks later.
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