Biden angrily defends himself in the face of criticism about his declining memory

US President Joe Biden strongly defended himself on Thursday, expressing his anger after a report exonerated him in an investigation into his retention of secret documents, but he described him as an elderly man with a weak memory.

Biden appeared extremely angry when he appeared on a live broadcast from the White House due to a report stating that he was unable to even remember the date of his son Beau’s death in 2015, as well as other major milestones in his life.

“My memory is fine,” Biden confirmed.

He added, striving to contain his emotion, “There is even an indication that I don’t remember the date of my son’s death… How dare he mention that?”

Other than that, the report prepared by Special Prosecutor Robert Hoare brought good news for Biden, as it cleared him of any misconduct in keeping secret documents that he used when he was Vice President under Barack Obama, in his private home and a former office.

This investigation is completely different from another criminal investigation targeting Biden’s likely rival in the upcoming presidential elections, former President Donald Trump, who is accused of carrying a large number of secret documents upon leaving the White House in 2021 and of obstructing attempts to recover them later.

However, Hoare dropped a heavy political bomb nine months before the presidential elections in November, as he wrote in the report that Biden seemed “an elderly man with good intentions and a weak memory”.

Hoare said in his report that, given Biden’s declining mental acuity, no jury would in any case find him guilty in relation to these documents.

In response to a question from reporters at the White House after his official statement, Biden said, “I am a man with good intentions, and I am an old man, but I know what I am doing, for God’s sake!”

He added, “I am the president and I am putting this country back on the right track… Look at what I have achieved since I became president”.

Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson and other senior Republican officials in the House considered the Hoare report deeply disturbing and showed that Biden was unfit to assume the presidency.

They added in a statement, “A man who cannot be held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly not worthy of the Oval Office”.

Earlier Thursday, Biden said that his acquittal by Hoare on legal matters means that this case is closed.

Biden has long faced criticism from the right and from within his party that he is too old to be president.

As he prepares for the upcoming presidential elections against Trump, whom he considers an existential threat to American democracy, Biden is focusing his campaign on his long experience and wise leadership of the economic recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic.

He stressed in his statements at the White House, “I am the most qualified person in the United States to be president and to accomplish the mission”.

But the impact of the Hoare report will be difficult to erase.

In a lapse that won’t contribute to improving the situation, Biden briefly confused Mexico and Egypt in his response to a journalist who asked him about the war in Gaza.

Merrick Garland, Attorney General in the Biden administration, appointed Hoare last year after secret documents were found in the president’s home in Delaware and in a former office.

The 388-page report stated that Biden “voluntarily kept and disclosed secret documents” in the period after he left the position of Vice President, long before he defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 elections and assumed the presidency.

Hoare, who was previously appointed by Trump as chief prosecutor in Maryland, said that the FBI recovered these documents about the military, foreign policy in Afghanistan, and other issues.

Hoare added, “We conclude that the evidence isn’t sufficient to convict, and we refrain from recommending the prosecution of Mr. Biden for keeping secret documents about Afghanistan”.

He went on to say, “It will be difficult to convince a jury that he, after becoming a former president in his late eighties, should be convicted of a serious crime that requires great mental presence”.

White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber and Biden’s personal lawyer Bob Bauer considered these comments inaccurate and inappropriate.”

“The report uses maddening language to describe something that witnesses often experience: difficulty remembering events that occurred several years ago,” they said in a letter to Hoare.