U.S. President Joe Biden’s mental health and his ability to lead his country has once again been called into question—not by his political opponents but in an official report.
Eighty-one-year-old Biden has been described as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in a report by Special Counsel Robert Hur who has led a 15-month investigation into whether Biden committed a crime for storing classified documents from his time as vice president (2009-2017) in his home, and not handing them over to the National Archives.
Though the report concluded that Biden had indeed retained and shared highly classified information, including about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, he will not face charges. Robert Hur wrote “it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him” —”a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”—of a serious felony “that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
While the charges of sharing classified information are damning enough, it is the mental state of the president that is especially disturbing, and is mentioned throughout the report:
In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013— when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’).
He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
Even journalists were more interested in this aspect of the report when they asked the president questions at a short press conference on Thursday, February 8th. Biden was intent on repairing his image, stating his “memory was fine,” but he looked lost and confused during the conference. Ironically, while answering a question about the situation in the Middle East, he contradicted his own assessment of his “fine memory” by calling the President of Egypt Abdel Fattah el-Sisi the “president of Mexico.”
Joe Biden’s mental health has been called into question many times before: only this week he confused previous German Chancellor Angela Merkel with her predecessor Helmut Kohl, saying the latter had attended a G7 summit in 2021. He also mixed up French President Emmanuel Macron with the late François Mitterrand.
Biden hit back at questions on his mental health by saying: “I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing.” He added he is “the most qualified person in this country to be president of the United States.” He said he struggled to remember certain key dates during his interviews with Robert Hur because he was “in the middle of handling an international crisis,” namely the attack on Israel by Palestinian terror group Hamas on October 7th.
Biden blamed his staff for putting the classified documents in his home in Delaware after his vice presidency ended, saying “I didn’t know how half the boxes got in my garage.” In his report Robert Hur wrote that Biden had also been keeping classified documents dating to the 1970s from his time in the Senate, and that his actions “present serious risks to national security, given the vulnerability of extraordinarily sensitive information to loss or compromise to America’s adversaries.”
Biden is seeking re-election in this year’s presidential elections, and will most likely face off against former President Donald Trump, in a rematch of the 2020 elections.
Trump also faces accusations of keeping classified national security information from his time as president at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.
Trump told Fox News on Thursday:
He [Biden] had many, many times more documents—totally unguarded. Mine were always surrounded by Secret Service and in locked rooms. … It is election interference. I did absolutely nothing wrong.
Pundits have reacted by suggesting that the Democrat establishment is no longer interested in propping up the president:
Reacting to the latest revelations, entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said it is more and more obvious that Joe Biden will not be the Democratic Party’s nominee despite running almost unopposed, and predicted that the party are planning to sideline Biden and bring in former first lady Michelle Obama.
