The full transcript of President Joe Biden’s five-hour interview with special counsel Robert Hur’s investigators “paints a more nuanced portrait” of Biden’s memory than the special counsel’s report, according to The Washington Post, which noted that “Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.”
The transcript “could raise questions about Hur’s depiction of the 81-year-old president as having ‘significant limitations’ on his memory,” according to The Associated Press.
Hur in his report declined to charge Biden, arguing that it would be difficult to convince a jury to convict with a memory that the special counsel described as “faulty” and “poor,” noting that Biden could not recall when his son Beau died or when he served as vice president.
But Biden said exactly when his son died in the interview.
“What month did Beau die? Oh God, May 30,” Biden said. When two others in the room chimed in with the year, Biden asked, “Was it 2015 when he died?”
Hur soon suggested taking a brief break, an offer Biden rejected before launching into a long explanation of Beau’s death.
“Let me just keep going to get it done,” Biden said.
Full transcript shows President Biden does recall the date of Beau Biden’s passing…. During interview with Special Counsel pic.twitter.com/oY2AAOMnQJ
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) March 12, 2024
Biden after the report’s release denied that he forgot when his son died.
“Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, was it any of their damn business?” Biden said at a press conference last month.
The full transcript shows that Biden repeatedly joked with prosecutors “in a setting that seemed more chummy than antagonistic,” the Post reported.
“The FBI know my house better than I do,” Biden quipped at one point. “I just hope you didn’t find any risqué pictures of my wife in a bathing suit,” the president later joked. “Which you probably did. She’s beautiful.”
Biden insisted he had little involvement in packing or moving boxes that included classified documents at the end of the Obama administration.
Asked what might have been stored in the boxes in his garage, Biden replied, “I have no goddamn idea. I didn’t even bother to go through them.”
“Somebody must’ve packed this up, just picked up all the stuff, and put it in a box, because I didn’t,” he later added.
The transcript also appears to shine a light on Hur’s claim that Biden could not remember when he served as vice president.
“My problem was I never knew where any of the documents of boxes were specifically coming from or who packed them,” he said. “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 sought to clarify his answer but one of Hur’s deputies pushed to move on.
During another point, Hur pointed to an image of a notebook related to Afghanistan.
“The date is 4-20-09,” Biden said. “Was I still vice president? I was, wasn’t I? Yeah.”
Hur in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday denied that he “disparage[d] the president unfairly” and claimed “the evidence and the president himself put his memory squarely at issue.”
National security attorney Bradley Moss predicted that “Democrats are going to eat Hur alive at this hearing.”
“I *think* Biden might be owed an apology,” tweeted Vox reporter Zach Beauchamp.
Politico’s Kyle Cheney flagged a portion of the transcript in which Hur, in the first sentence of Biden’s interview, gets the time of day wrong.
“Can’t make it up,” he wrote.
CAN’T MAKE IT UP: In the first sentence of the first part of Hur’s Biden interview — which has become about Biden’s grasp of dates and recall — Hur gets the time of day wrong. pic.twitter.com/O0joRlUo5P
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) March 12, 2024
“Hur's claim that Biden couldn't remember the day his son died was an outrageous lie,” argued Tommy Vietor, a former Obama staffer and commentator. “It's also cruel & irrelevant. Anyone who has experienced loss like that can remember images, smells, bit of conversations. The pain is burned into you. Dates blend together bc they're irrelevant.”
Attorney Andrew Laufer tweeted, “Hur lied. That’s really the only appropriate response.”
White House spokesman Ian Sams told CNN on Tuesday that Hur’s opening statement to the committee was also “misleading.”
“I think it lays bare pretty clearly that the result of this 15 month investigation that was led by a Trump appointee prosecutor who was named special counsel, found that there was no case here,” he said. “I think that some of those that language that you just laid out is a little bit misleading. In fact, later in the report, 200 pages in, not on page two, but 200 pages in, he says very clearly that the evidence does not fully support the idea that he willfully retained classified documents.”
WH Spokesperson Sams: The transcript lays bare pretty clearly that the result of this 15-month investigation, led by a Trump appointed prosecutor, was that there was no case here. Hur says clearly the evidence does not support that President Biden willfully retained documents pic.twitter.com/BplkKHGm4k
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 12, 2024
