Allies of President Joe Biden insisted over the weekend that he is “on his game” after a special counsel report released Thursday described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Special counsel Robert Hur’s report assessing whether Biden mishandled classified documents in the past referenced Biden’s lapses in memory and his advanced age, and the president mixed up the leaders of Mexico and Egypt in his Thursday night remarks addressing the report’s findings. Several Biden allies appeared on Sunday morning news programming and stated that his mental faculties are not in decline amid the renewed scrutiny of his cognitive state.
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A national poll from NBC News released on Feb. 6, before the Hur report came out or Biden’s subsequent press conference, showed that about 75% of voters, including approximately 50% of Democrats, have concerns about Biden’s physical and mental fitness for a second term in office.
Hur’s report “made a conclusion that there is no case, case closed, then made gratuitous, unnecessary, and inaccurate personal remarks and those are improper,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Director Alejandro Mayorkas told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it because he is sharp, intensely probing, and detail-oriented and focused.”
The report describes instances in which Biden was unsure of when he was vice president, did not remember significant details from the internal Obama administration debate about the 2009 Afghanistan troop surge that he opposed, and forgot the year his son Beau passed away. It also chronicles Biden’s “painfully slow” taped conversations with a researcher helping him with his memoir before running for president, stating that Biden “[struggled] to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”
Mayorkas added that he has not seen anything that would prompt him to doubt or be worried about Biden’s mental faculties.
Mitch Landrieu, the national co-chair for Biden’s 2024 campaign told “Meet the Press” that “this guy’s tough, he’s smart, he’s on his game,” referencing the president. “The one thing Joe Biden is never going to do… he is never, ever going to quit, because that’s not what he’s done his entire life,” Landrieu said.
“And as Secretary Mayorkas said a minute ago, ‘When you go on to brief the president, you better have your big boy pants on,’” Landrieu added. “And this kind of sense that he’s not ready for this job is just a bucket of B.S. that’s so deep, your boots will get stuck in it.”
Biden’s personal counsel, Bob Bauer, stated that the president “does not” have a problem with his memory when he appeared Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
“There were a couple of occasions when the special counsel, who had flagged at the beginning that sometimes he asks imprecise questions, asked questions that the president picked apart as a matter of logic,” Bauer said on the program. “He showed that the question didn’t have a logical underpinning. Now, everybody in the room recognized that was the case. It showed the president was listening carefully and understood precisely what was wrong with those questions. I didn’t come away from the special counsel’s failure to ask precise questions and think to myself, ‘He has mental acuity problems.’ I just thought, ‘He was asking bad questions.’”
Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the report on Friday, calling it and its content “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate.” Additionally, Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Biden is “absolutely lucid.”
Nick Pope on February 11, 2024
