President Joe Biden’s claim that Special Counsel Robert Hur questioned him about the timing of his son Beau Biden’s death is false, and the president actually brought up the subject himself during his interview, according to an NBC News report.
During his address to the nation following the release of the damning report of the Biden classified documents investigation on February 8 –in which the special counsel wrote Biden failed to “remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died” – Biden slammed Hur for choosing to “raise that.”
“There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden said. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, ‘It wasn’t any of their damn business.’”
However, sources told NBC News that Hur did not ask such a question, and Biden brought up Beau’s death himself in the interview while discussing the period of time he worked with a ghostwriter on a memoir regarding his son’s passing:
But Hur never asked that question, according to two people familiar with Hur’s five-hour interview with the president over two days last October. It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden’s death, they said.
Biden raised his son’s death after being asked about his workflow at a Virginia rental home from 2016 to 2018, the sources said, when a ghost writer was helping him write a memoir about losing Beau to brain cancer in 2015. Investigators had a 2017 recording showing that Biden had told the ghost writer he had found “classified stuff” in that home, the report says.
Biden began trying to recall that period by discussing what else was happening in his life, and it was at that point in the interview that he appeared confused about when Beau had died, the sources said. Biden got the date—May 30—correct, but not the year.
The report states the investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” although it does not establish guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” Breitbart News Capitol Hill Correspondent Bradley Jaye noted.
Biden’s memory also factored in the decision not to pursue charges, per the report:
We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of 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.
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” the report adds.
