One of the big takeaways from the newly released transcript of President Joe Biden’s two-day interview with Robert Hur is that the special counsel was being exceedingly generous when describing the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Much of the conversation with Hur is littered with barely incoherent answers and spiraling word salads. Though, the reader is occasionally entertained by Biden’s blowhard-y non sequiturs. We learn about Biden’s Corvette—twice. We learn that the president is a frustrated architect but an excellent archer. Biden even jokes that there might be risque pictures of First Lady Dr. Jill Biden.
Then again, the fact that the entire two-day interview isn’t a giant nonsensical rant is not as impressive as his defenders might believe. The president is, indeed, completely coherent at times. And those are the times he’s probably lying.
When Hur released his report last month, for example, it noted that Biden couldn’t recall the year his son died. This is not the kind of event that typically slips a healthy person’s mind—not even one who is constantly trying to emotionally manipulate the public with misleading claims about the cause of his son’s death.
Recall that Biden feigned great anger about this interaction. “There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” he barked at reporters when the report was released. “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself: It wasn’t any of their damn business.”
The transcript shows that it was Biden who brought up his late son Beau, not Hur. The president claimed he believed Beau had died in 2017 or 2018 when he had tragically died of brain cancer in 2015.
Who knows? Maybe Biden forgot what he said? Reading the full context of his answer, and considering the president’s lifelong fabulism, it is not entirely out of the question that the president purposely floated the wrong date to try and justify his pilfering of classified documents. Either way, it’s bad.
