Mr. Biden expressed particular outrage at that line. “How the hell dare he bring this up?” the president said during a news conference held hours after Mr. Hur’s report was released. “Honestly, when I was asked the question, I figured it was none of their business.”
The transcript shows that Mr. Hur did not specifically ask when Beau Biden died. Instead, Mr. Hur urged Mr. Biden to counter a “moonshot” project about where he stored documents related to work he did after he left the vice presidency in January 2017, such as a lecturer at a think tank in Washington Cancer and the book he had written about Beau’s death.
At that point, Mr. Biden, who sometimes stutters, began to stutter and distort things. He said “when I got out of the Senate” when he meant leaving the vice presidential office, and he seemed to confuse the events of 2015, when Beau died and Mr. Biden decided not to run against Hillary Clinton for the presidency Democrats in 2016, with events in 2017 when he wrote his memoirs and decided to run for president in the 2020 cycle:
BIDEN: Well, um… I, I, I, I, I don’t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, this area?
HUR: Yes, sir.
BIDEN: Remember, during this period of time, my son is either deployed or dying, and so it was – and by the way, at the time I left the Senate, there were still a lot of people encouraging me, during that time to run, with the exception of President. That’s not me – and it’s not mean to say that. He just thought she had a better chance of winning the presidency than I did. And I hadn’t at that point – even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t wavered from the idea that I could run for office again. But if I were to run again, I would run for president. So what happened now – what month did Beau die? Oh God, May 30th –
RACHEL COTTON, A LAWYER IN THE WHITE HOUSE: 2015.
Unknown male speaker: 2015.
BIDEN: Did he die in 2015?
Unidentified Male Speaker: It was May 2015.
BIDEN: It was 2015.
ROBERT BAUER, BIDEN’S PERSONAL ATTORNEY: Or – I’m not sure of the month, sir, but I think that was the year.
MARC KRICKBAUM, HUR’S DEPUTY: Correct, Mr. President. It –
BIDEN: And what happened in the meantime when – and Trump is elected in November 2017?
Unknown male speaker: 2016.
Unknown male speaker: ’16.
BIDEN: ’16, 2016. All right. So – why is the year 2017 written here?
ED SISKEL, BIDEN’S WHITE HOUSE LAWYER: That’s when you left office, in January 2017.
BIDEN: Yeah, okay. But then Trump will be sworn in in January.
SISKEL: Right.
BAUER: Right, right.
BIDEN: Okay, yeah. And in 2017 Beau had passed away and – this is personal…
Mr. Biden then recounted Beau’s death; how he came to write the subsequent book, “Promise Me, Dad,” based on his son’s dying plea to continue in public service; and how he decided to run for president against Donald J. Trump in 2017 after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Mr. Biden had several other mistakes.
The minutes also contained some apparently minor gaffes that went unmentioned in Mr Hur’s report. For example, Mr. Biden had to be asked to remember the name of the federal agency responsible for preserving official records – the National Archives – or that the fax machine is the name of the device that transmits images of documents over telephone lines.
But Mr. Hur made a particularly striking claim when he declared that Mr. Biden “couldn’t remember when he was vice president.” As evidence, Mr. Hur quoted him as saying, “If it was 2013 – when did I stop being vice president?” According to the report, on the second day of questioning, Mr. Biden showed similar confusion and asked, “Am I still vice president in 2009?” ?”
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2024-03-12 13:36:14
www.nytimes.com
