(NewsNation) — Concerns about President Joe Biden’s age are again being raised after a special counsel report into his handling of classified information characterized him as an elderly man with a poor memory.
Is Biden too old to run for president again?
“I don’t like the idea that people assign a number to your … cognitive ability,” comedian Adam Carolla said Friday on “CUOMO.”
Special counsel Robert Hur used his assessment of Biden as a justification, in part, for not recommending criminal charges in a report released Thursday detailing his investigation into Biden. Hur was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland after classified documents were found in Biden’s Delaware home and a Washington, D.C., office.
The documents were transported there after Biden left the White House in 2017, and he used some of them as notes to rely on in recorded conversations with a ghostwriter for his memoir. While Hur concluded Biden willfully retained the document, he said prosecutors would likely not be able to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.
Hur also said he would have reached the same conclusion absent the Justice Department’s longstanding policy against indicting sitting presidents.
Hours after the report was released, Biden gave a prime-time address, angrily responding to Hur’s comments about his memory. Biden particularly took issue with Hur writing that the president couldn’t recall “even within a few years” when his son Beau died.
“How the hell dare he bring that up?” Biden said in his address.
The fiery speech was short, but pundits and Republicans pounced on one mistake.
Biden was on his way out of the room before returning to the lectern to speak about the war in Gaza, apparently prompted by a reporter’s shouted question. He then mistakenly called the Egyptian leader the “president of Mexico.”
“I kind of think of it like, remember you’d go out, you had one of those buddies in college who drank really hard and like to get into fights he couldn’t win? When (Biden) turned around, (it was like) there’s some guy at the bar with cauliflower ear wearing a Tap Out T-shirt and your buddy’s hassling that guy, and at some point you smooth it over, and you get him out to the truck, and as you’re trying to get the car started you look, and you see he’s walked back into the bar,” Carolla said of the moment.
“His aides “must have been back there just going ‘we were this close to getting out of this bar without you having a black eye.'”
NewsNation sources with the Biden campaign said they see the report’s ultimate conclusion as a win for the president — but it will be up to voters whether allegations about the president’s memory hurt him in the general election this year, especially when there were already concerns about his age.
Biden turns 82 in November and if elected to a second term would be 86 by the time he leaves office in 2029.
But Carolla points to people such as independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (age 82) and the late Norman Lear (age 101 at death) as elders who are and were “sharp as a tack.”
“I don’t think we need to assign an a number to it — you’re either up to the job or you’re not,” Carolla said. “Norman Lear was completely and utterly functional 10 years older than Joe Biden is now, and then beyond.”