President Joe Biden angrily admonished former Special Counsel Robert Hur last month for asking questions about Beau Biden’s death in their October interviews.
“How in the hell dare he raise that,” Biden said at a White House press conference. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
But according to transcripts of the president’s interviews with federal investigators obtained by The Federalist, President Biden was the one who brought up his son’s death, to which Hur offered immediate condolences.
“I wanted people to know what kind of man he was,” Biden said to describe why he wrote Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose at the end of the Obama administration.
“We’re going to be talking about Promise Me, Dad further on, and tomorrow as well,” Hur said, “But please just allow me to say for a moment, I am so terribly, terribly sorry for your loss.”
Biden later brought up unprovoked details about his son’s death later in the interview, which turned out to be incorrect. When asked about mishandling classified documents at the Penn Biden Center, the president clarified the timeline at the center of the special counsel’s inquiry and then made reference to his son’s military deployment.
“This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?” Biden asked about the line of questioning.
“Yes, sir,” Hur said.
“Remember, in this timeframe, my son is — either been deployed or is dying, and, so it was — and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president,” Biden said.
Except Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015.
Biden spoke at the White House in February, hours after the special counsel’s report publicly concluded the president was too senile to face felony charges over mishandling classified documents. Federal prosecutors under President Biden have charged their political opponent, former President Donald Trump, with 40 criminal counts of mishandling classified records.
“Biden,” read Hur’s report, “would likely present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt,” read the nearly 400-page report. “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.”
According to the transcripts of the special counsel’s interviews, Biden repeatedly needed assistance remembering significant dates, such as when he was vice president.
“Wel, if it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?” Biden asked on the first day of interviews.
“The date is 4-20-09,” Biden said on the second day. “Was I still Vice President?”
Biden’s memory also “appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him,” Hur wrote in his report. The 2021 debacle in Afghanistan remains one of the president’s worst controversies in office, from which approval ratings never recovered.
The president was caught in several other lies at the gaffe-filled press conference last month, including claims related to the level of records’ classification and whether he shared top-secret information with his ghostwriter. Biden vehemently denied revealing classified material with writer Mark Zwonitzer, who worked with the president on two memoirs. Though Hur’s report concluded “disclosure of classified information from his notebooks to his ghostwriter risked serious damage to America’s national security.”
[READ: 4 Lies Joe Biden Spouted Off In Angry Special Counsel Press Conference]
