WASHINGTON (CN) — If the White House was concerned that a special counsel report on President Biden’s handling of classified documents would hand a political pry bar to Republicans, their fears were certainly realized Thursday evening, as lawmakers piled on investigators’ portrayal of the president’s age and mental faculties.
Although special counsel Robert Hur’s report concluded that Biden should not be criminally charged despite “willfully” retaining classified documents from his time as vice president, GOP lawmakers seized on the former U.S. attorney’s remarks that the president demonstrated “limited precision and recall” during interviews with investigators.
“No one — and I mean no one — believes Joe Biden can serve as president until 2029,” Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton wrote Friday morning in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “His campaign for reelection is a preposterous lie and an insult to the American people.”
Investigators cited moments where Biden appeared to be unsure about when he served as vice president, a position that he held from 2009 to 2017 under former President Barack Obama. The report also appeared to suggest the president was foggy on the details of his son Beau Biden’s 2015 death.
Hur and his team posited that, if Biden were to be tried as a private citizen for crimes related to the classified documents probe, he 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.”
The implications of such a statement were not lost on congressional Republicans already angling to make the 81-year-old Biden’s age a stumbling block for Democrats ahead of the November presidential election.
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley argued Hur’s report demonstrates that “the president is a criminal, but mentally unfit to stand trial.”
“Quite a pitch for Biden to take to voters,” he said.
Hawley, as well as Florida Senator Rick Scott and Utah Senator Mike Lee, separately called on Congress to invoke the 25th Amendment, a constitutional provision that allows the White House cabinet and vice president to remove the president by majority vote if they determine he is unfit for office.
House Republicans joined in on the dogpile, demanding Thursday that the Justice Department publish the transcript from Hur’s interview with Biden.
“The American people deserve transparency about President Biden’s mental state,” the House GOP wrote in a post from the party’s official X account.
“Bottom line,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, “he’s unfit for the presidency — and there’s a two-tiered justice system.”
The White House, meanwhile, has strongly refuted the special counsel’s portrayal of Biden's mental state.
A letter from Biden’s personal counsel included in Hur’s report addresses those issues directly, telling the special counsel that his treatment of the president’s memory is not “accurate or appropriate” and arguing that the report “uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events.”
During a snap news conference held Thursday night, Biden himself raked Hur over the coals, taking particular offense to the report’s suggestion that he was unsure about when his son had died.
“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden said. “I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away. Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
The president pushed back on questions from reporters about his mental acuity. “My memory is fine,” he said.
Even some former White House officials were put off by the special counsel report’s assertions about Biden’s memory.
“Special counsel Hur report on Biden classified documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with longstanding DOJ traditions,” wrote former Attorney General Eric Holder in a post on X Thursday night. “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised.”
Congressional Democrats, for their part, largely steered clear of the issue, instead pointing out that Hur’s inquiry exonerated the president of any wrongdoing and holding it up as an example of the nonpartisan justice system.
“This investigation exemplifies President Biden and Attorney General [Merrick] Garland’s commitment to avoiding even the appearance of politicization at the Justice Department,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin in a statement Thursday evening, comparing Hur’s inquiry to the separate Justice Department investigation into former President Trump’s handling of classified documents.
“This case demonstrates that the Justice Department is not the personal law firm of any president, and I hope this episode impresses that on all public officials,” Durbin wrote.
Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight, concurred, writing in a statement that “there is plainly no comparison here to the conduct of former President Trump.”
Hur, a former U.S. attorney appointed in 2018 by then-President Trump, was tapped by the Justice Department in January 2023 to lead the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
With the November election fast approaching, questions about Biden’s age are sure to follow him to the ballot box — but his likely challenger former President Trump, who will turn 78 in June, has come under similar scrutiny.
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