(NewsNation) — President Joe Biden slammed a government report claiming he had memory issues during a Thursday night news conference, but at times spoke incoherently and may have done as much to fan the claims he’s forgetful as he did to refute them.
It was in response to the report by DOJ special counsel Robert Hur investigating his handling of classified documents. NewsNation sources say Biden was moved to call the news conference because of a passage in the report that said he didn’t remember his late son Beau Biden’s death.
“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden asked during the news conference.
Biden insisted to reporters that “My memory is fine,” and said he believes he remains the most qualified person to serve as president.
But during his at-times-tense volley with reporters, Biden appeared to forget where Beau Biden received his rosary, and mistakenly called the president of Egypt the president of Mexico.
Biden denied that he improperly shared classified information and lashed out at special counsel Robert Hur‘s questioning of his mental acuity and assertion that a jury would find the president a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“I’m well meaning, and I’m an elderly man. And I know what the hell I’m doing,” Biden said Thursday night, responding to a reporter. “My memory is so bad I let you speak.”
Hur was appointed to investigate Biden after a handful of classified documents were discovered at his home in Delaware and a former Washington, D.C., office he used after leaving the White House.
The report said that Biden did willfully retain classified information after he was vice president. These materials included: marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan; notebooks containing handwritten entries about issues of national security; and information about foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.
The searing findings will almost certainly blunt his efforts to draw contrast with Donald Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in November’s presidential election, over a criminal indictment charging the former president with illegally hoarding classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and refusing to return them to the government. Despite abundant differences between the cases, Trump immediately seized on the special counsel report to portray himself as a victim of a “two-tiered system of justice.”
Yet even as Hur found evidence that Biden willfully held onto and shared with a ghostwriter highly classified information, the special counsel devoted much of his report to explaining why he did not believe the evidence met the standard for criminal charges, including a high probability that the Justice Department would not be able to prove Biden’s intent beyond a reasonable doubt, citing among other things an advanced age that they said made him forgetful and the possibility of “innocent explanations” for the records that they could not refute.
“I did not share classified information,” Biden insisted. “I did not share it with my ghostwriter.” He added he wasn’t aware how the boxes containing classified documents ended up in his garage.
Biden’s lawyers blasted the report for what they said were inaccuracies and gratuitous swipes at the president. In a statement, Biden said he was “pleased” Hur had “reached the conclusion I believed all along they would reach — that there would be no charges brought in this case and the matter is now closed.”
He pointedly noted that he had sat for five hours of in-person interviews in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ October attack on Israel, when “I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.