Military News Today

President Joe Biden heavily defended himself against charges that he suffers from memory loss. On Thursday night, the President gave an unusual late night press briefing at the White House responding to Robert Hur’s report on the Presidents handling of classified information.

In Hur’s report, Hur made reference to the President’s mental fitness, saying his memory was “significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and his interview with our office in 2023.”

Alarmingly, the report by Hur even showed that Biden didn’t remember, even closely the year his son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015.

“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden said, adding that when he was asked about Beau’s death during the probe, he thought to himself that it “wasn’t any of their damn business.”

“I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away,” Biden said Thursday night, reiterating that he wears his late son’s rosary beads and honors him with a service every Memorial Day. The president often talks about Beau in speeches, especially in discussing loss and grief.

President Biden’s response to a reporter was, “My memory’s fine.”

Making things worse, adding fuel to the fire Biden later mistakenly referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi as the president of Mexico. Biden’s mixup happened during his response to questions about the Israel-Hamas war. This is now the third time this week the President has mixed up heads of state.

The appearance by the President came just hours after Hur released his report into Biden’s handling of classified documents. 

Hur concluded that no prosecution of Biden, but did find the President “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”

Senior aides to the President at the White House felt it imperative for Biden to publicly call out what they view as a politically fuelled criticism from Hur.

Senior White House officials also felt that Hur’s mentioning of the President’s memory in relation to his son were “way out of line” and “gratuitous”.

Hur’s report finally found that if put in front of a jury, the jury would come to the same conclusion as the report. The report said:

“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. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt,” the report said. “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.”