The White House blasted a report from a Department of Justice special counsel that suggested President Joe Biden was suffering memory lapses, and Vice President Kamala Harris called the report “clearly politically motivated.”
The report from Special Counsel Robert Hur, a former US attorney in Maryland during Republican Donald Trump’s administration, has prompted an election-year brawl and renewed questions about Biden’s advanced age. This week Biden, 81, mixed up the names of several world leaders.
Ian Sams, spokesperson for the White House legal counsel’s office, joined press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in the White House briefing room to criticize Hur’s report and raise questions about his motivation.
Hur said in a report released on Thursday that he chose not to bring criminal charges following a 15-month investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents because the president cooperated.
Hur said Biden would be difficult to convict and described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who was not able to recall to investigators when his son, Beau Biden, died.
“We don’t think that part of the report lives in reality,” Jean-Pierre said.
“We just reject that this is true,” Sams said.
Harris rushed to Biden’s defense when asked about the issue after a White House appearance.
“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and (is)clearly politically motivated,” she said, according to a pool report.
Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have sought to present the Department of Justice as independent from the White House, after Trump put pressure on the DOJ to shut down a probe into Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
