Officials race to contain the fallout after special counsel faults 81-year-old president’s memory
WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON—President Biden’s age has long been a private worry for many Democrats and a drag on his polling numbers. This week those anxieties came spilling out into the public.
The trigger was special counsel Robert Hur’s 345-page report on Biden’s retention of classified documents, which contained a series of damaging passages about the president’s recollections and “faulty memory” during interviews with investigators last fall. The fear for the White House and Biden’s re-election campaign is that the document will reinforce doubts among large groups of voters about the 81-year-old president’s abilities as he seeks a second term against likely GOP nominee former President Donald Trump.
Democrats reacted with a mix of frustration and anger to Hur’s report, which said Biden portrayed himself as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Behind the scenes, Biden himself has been furious. At a House Democratic retreat on Thursday, the president unloaded to a small group of lawmakers, questioning the accuracy of the report by asking, “You think I would f—ing forget the day my son died?” according to people familiar with his private comments.
Not all the fire was directed outward: One former Biden aide blamed members of the president’s team for allowing the president to be interviewed by the special counsel in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, an episode that led Biden to spend hours in meetings with national security advisers in the Situation Room. “How can they staff him so poorly and put him in that situation—on that day?” asked the former adviser.
At the White House, officials were apoplectic as they raced to contain the fallout from the characterization of Biden’s memory by Hur, whom Trump appointed to be U.S. attorney in Maryland during his presidency and whom Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped to oversee the Biden document case. Vice President Kamala Harris weighed in Friday, saying the report “could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated.”
