President Joe Biden delivered a gaffe-filled speech in a prime-time press conference Thursday night where he peddled a series of lies debunked by Special Counsel Robert Hur.
Hours earlier, the special counsel published a nearly 400-page report outlining the conclusions of a year-long investigation into President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. Prosecutors declined to charge the president in part because Biden is an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him by — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” Hur’s team wrote. Biden reportedly forgot when he was vice president and struggled with the timeline of his son’s death, “even within several years.”
Here are 4 lies the president shared throughout the 30-minute speech.
1. Biden Says He Did Not Share Classified Info with His Ghostwriter
Biden vehemently denied ever having shared classified material with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, who worked with the president on two memoirs. The bombshell report from a special counsel investigation, however, said Biden’s “disclosure of classified information from his notebooks to his ghostwriter risked serious damage to America’s national security.”
2. Biden Says Classified Documents Were Secured Within His Home
The president sought to distinguish his own case from charges levied against former President Donald Trump, who faces a 40-count indictment over allegations of mishandling classified documents. Prosecutors said the documents at Mar-a-Lago were recklessly stored and were discovered in the “ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.”
“All the stuff that was in my home was in filing cabinets that were either locked or able to be locked,” Biden told reporters Thursday.
Hur’s report, however, said investigators found classified documents in the “garage, offices, and basement den” of Biden’s Delaware home.
“And the place where the Afghanistan documents were eventually found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware garage — in a badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus — suggests the documents might have been forgotten,” Hur’s report noted.
3. Biden Insists His Memory ‘Is Fine’
Biden insisted to reporters his “memory is fine” in the same press conference that he confused the “president of Mexico” with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi when responding to a question about the situation in Gaza.
Biden also angrily fought back allegations that he confused the timeline of his son’s death, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015.
“I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away,” Biden said.
The facts and circumstances surrounding Beau’s death have become one of the president’s most routinely botched lines in speeches across the country that even cable news commentators have repeated the false claim.
4. Biden Says None Of The Records Found In His Possession Were ‘High Classified’
The president denied any of the material found at his Delaware residence were “high classified.” The special counsel report, however, made clear that documents were discovered with “classification markings up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information Level.”
