In a defiant speech denying he has a ‘poor memory’, Biden falters at the last moment

Anger may become the oxygen to carry Joe Biden through the United States general election.

Thursday had been a day of mind-bending strangeness by the time the president delivered an unexpected evening-time address from the White House in which he sternly defended himself against the allegation that he has a “poor memory”.

That characterisation came from special counsel Robert Hur in his report on whether the president had mishandled classified documents.

In clearing Biden and acknowledging his willingness to co-operate, Hur ventured that one of the reasons he decided against pressing ahead with prosecution was that at a trial, “Mr Biden 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.”

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He was someone, Hur wrote “for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt”.

It was just a line in a report that went on for some 388 pages, but each word was laced with explosive charge.

Later in the report, Hur said the president’s memory was “worse” during the interview with him than it was in recorded conversations from 2017. “He did not remember when he was vice-president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended ... and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began...”. And he said the president did not remember “within several years” when his son Beau died.

The issue of Biden’s age and the perception that his memory is faltering has hummed like a generator in the background of this election campaign. Hur’s report invited a public conversation and that is what happened on Thursday night in the White House. It was almost Joe Biden’s finest hour. Almost.

“As you know the special counsel released their findings today about their looking into my handling of classified documents. I was pleased to see he reached a firm conclusion: no charges should be brought against me, going back 40 years. This was an exhaustive investigation, going back 40 years, even into the 1970s when I was still a new United States senator,” he said, in an impressive opening which immediately set to depict his meeting with Hur in a very different light.

“He acknowledged I co-operated completely ... I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on October 8th and 9th of last year even though Israel had just been attacked by Hamas on the 7th and I was very occupied. I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”

He was reading his lines, of course, but the force of the address and the specificity – the dates and the enormity of that international crisis lent credence to the idea that he might have been understandably distracted at the time. But then he went on the attack.

“In addition, I know there was some attention paid to some language in the report about my recollection of events. There is even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in hell dare he raise that? Frankly when I was asked the question, I thought to myself was it any of their damn business? Let me tell you something. I wear every day since he died the rosary that he got from our Lady of ... every Memorial Day we hold a service attended by friends and family and people who loved him, I don’t need anyone. I don’t need anyone to remind when he passed away.

“The simple truth is I sat for five hours of an interview on events going back over 40 years. Their task was to make a decision whether to move forward with charges in this case. For any extraneous commentary they don’t know what they are talking about. It has no place in this report,” Biden said.

There was no doubting the emotion in his voice here. It was, at this stage, a retort that bordered on contemptuous. On the news networks afterwards, during the blaze of analysis, several former White House staffers speculated that the decision to make the address had been Biden’s – and that it had been the right call.

But it was when he offered to take questions afterwards that things got messy. Suddenly, a conversation that had been stilted and cloaked in metaphor was out in the open. The president was asked about the phrase in the report that will be remembered long after the source has been forgotten.

“I am well meaning. And I am an elderly man. And I know what I’m doing, I’ve been president and I have put this country back on its feet. I don’t need his recommendation.”

“How bad is your memory?” came a call from the press gathering.

“And can you continue as president?”

“My memory is so bad I let you speak,” Biden snapped back speedily enough to draw a few laughs.

If it had ended there, it would have registered as one of his more powerful public oratories. And, in fact, he had taken his last question and was walking away from the podium when he was asked about the Gaza war and returned to make one last point. And then his memory did fail him. In referencing his efforts to help secure a pathway for humanitarian aid into Gaza, Biden reminded his audience that “the president of Mexico El-Sisi did not want to open the gate to humanitarian aid to get in. I convinced him to open the gate”.

He had meant to say the president of Egypt. But if he heard his own mistake, he did not move to correct it. And within minutes of his leaving the room, it was seized upon by Biden’s critics as further evidence of the declining mental faculties that Hur had highlighted in the report.

Hur served as US attorney for Maryland following his appointment by Jeff Sessions, then attorney general during the Trump administration. He left private practice when requested by current attorney general Merrick Garland to oversee the Department of Justice’s investigation into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents when he was vice-president. Spokespeople for Biden argued that his role ought to have been limited to his decision to prosecute or not rather than deliver an opinion on the president’s mental capabilities.

In any case, the report has pushed into the foreground the great national unease about an impending election between Trump and Biden. It places under a magnifying glass the issue of whether either man is of a suitable age to go through a gruelling election campaign in order to next year begin before undertaking a second term in office.

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