Legal Exoneration, Political Nightmare
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The special counsel hit at President Biden’s biggest political vulnerability, calling him “elderly” with a “poor memory,” and said he could not recall when he was vice president. White House officials disagreed.
The memory of the then-80-year-old president was so hazy during five hours of interviews with the F.B.I. investigators over two days, according to the report by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel, that it would be difficult to convince jurors that Mr. Biden knew his handling of the documents was wrong.
The president’s lawyers, Bob Bauer and Richard Sauber, took exception in a Feb. 5 letter with Mr. Hur’s description of the president’s memory.
“It is hardly fair to concede that the president would be asked about events years in the past, press him to give his ‘best’ recollections and then fault him for his limited memory,” the lawyers wrote. “The president’s inability to recall dates or details of events that happened years ago is neither surprising nor unusual.”
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