President Biden gave a fiery defense of his mental acuity at the White House on Thursday after the Justice Department delivered a report that described him as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
President Biden gave a fiery defense of his mental sharpness tonight, and took questions from reporters about a Justice Department report that determined no criminal charges were warranted over old classified documents found in his possession. But the report casts judgment over his memory, and Biden said that aspersion did not belong in the report. NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson is at the White House. Mara, tell us more about what the president said tonight.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: The president was not happy about this. He did respond to the substance of the report where the bottom line was, he wasn’t charged. He said, I did not break the law, period. That was the good part of the report. But he went right into the most damning part of the report, where the special counsel, Robert Hur, described him as a, quote, “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” saying it would be hard to convict him because a jury would be sympathetic to him. And here is how Biden responded to that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man. And I know what the hell I’m doing.
LIASSON: This is very damning. It is almost as if the special counsel gave a kind of housekeeping – Good Housekeeping seal of approval to Biden’s worst problem. It was almost like an official diagnosis. Big majorities of both parties – voters in both parties think the president is too old, and they worry about his mental acuity. And here is the special counsel saying the same thing. This reminded me of James Comey who, at the end of the campaign in 2016 after investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails, decided not to charge her. But when he came out to say he wasn’t going to…
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