Special Counsel Robert Hur, who oversaw investigating President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, is speaking before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. The Epoch Times reviewed redacted copies of the transcript of his 5-hour interview with the president over two days on Oct. 8 and 9.
The Epoch Times team confirmed some of the findings of the special counsel’s report, issued on Feb. 8. The transcript, which is more than 250 pages long, showed that the president indeed had problems remembering key dates.
When asked about a notebook dated “4-20-09,” President Biden said, “Was I still vice president? I was, wasn’t I?”
The transcript showed that Mr. Hur didn’t directly inquire about the date of his son Beau Biden’s death.
Instead, Mr. Hur was trying to understand where President Biden kept papers related to the work he did after leaving the vice presidency in Jan. 2017.
At that point, President Biden started to stutter and mix up what he was saying.
He said “when I got out of the Senate” when he intended to say when he left the vice presidency, and he seemingly conflated events of 2017 and 2018.
According to the transcript, President Biden said: “Remember, in this time frame, my son is—either been deployed or is dying, and, 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.”
“I’m not—and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did,” President Biden said, referring to Hillary Clinton. “And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point—even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for president. And, and so what was happening, though—what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th—”
The president was reminded that his son died in 2015.
“Was it 2015 he had died?” President Biden asked.
“And what’s happened in the meantime is that as—and Trump gets elected in November of 2017?” President Biden continued.
He was interrupted and corrected again that it was 2016.
“All right. So—why do I have 2017 here?” President Biden asked.
“That’s when you left office, January of 2017,” Ed Siskel, the White House counsel said in response.
“Yeah, OK. But that’s when Trump gets sworn in, January,” President Biden said.
Special Counsel’s Report
Mr. Hur’s report, issued on Feb. 8, found evidence that President Biden “willfully retained” and shared highly classified information after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen but determined that evidence didn’t support charging the president.
Yet, what captured the greatest attention within the special counsel’s report was the special counsel’s depiction of the president’s mental fitness. In his 388-page report to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Mr. Hur included a highly critical evaluation of the 81-year-old president’s mental fitness, describing him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The report referred to the president’s memory as “hazy,” “significantly limited,” “faulty,” and “poor.”
The White House attacked the report’s findings about the president’s memory, calling them “gratuitous” and “politically motivated.”
During a five-hour interview over two days on Oct. 8 and 9, President Biden displayed poor memory, as he couldn’t recall the start or end of his vice presidency, according to Mr. Hur’s report.
President Biden also struggled to recall significant events, such as the timing of his son Beau’s death and details about important matters such as the Afghanistan debate, the report stated.
According to the transcript, President Biden was questioned about how a specific folder ended up in his garage.
“My problem was I never knew where any of the documents or boxes were specifically coming from or who packed them. Just did I get them delivered to me. And so this is—I’m, at this stage, in 2009, am I still vice president?” he asked.
President Biden stressed during the interview that when he found classified information he returned it, according to the transcript of his Oct. 9 interview with Special Counsel Hur and his deputy, Marc Krickbaum.
“I know that anything I found that had—when it was overwhelmingly clear that it was classified, I returned. If you ask me how many times I did that; I don’t know,” said President Biden. “But I did not keep anything that was marked—that was clearly marked having been handed to me when I was Vice President. That’s the only point I was trying to make.”
Moreover, the president said he did not recall finding anything after he left the vice presidency that had classified markings on it.
He also said that he “never kept anything when I wasn’t Vice President or President that, in fact, was classified document to be used by me for any reason.”
Afghanistan
As the interview progressed, it went off the record as it appears that the special counsel and President Biden and his counsel were discussing classified information pertaining to the war in Afghanistan. The interview went back onto the record.
This Afghanistan information, said President Biden, was classified so that he would not “embarrass” President Barack Obama with whom he had disagreements regarding foreign policy, including the war in Afghanistan, which the United States would eventually withdraw from under President Biden in 2021.
President Biden kept this classified information after his vice presidency, according to Mr. Krickbaum. This discussion about Afghanistan was about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, which President Obama eventually did, sending 30,000 of them.
President Biden recalled being told by the State Department and the Defense Department that the level of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan would be the same after eliminating Osama bin Laden, which occurred via a U.S. special operation in Pakistan in 2011, and Al-Qaeda being defeated.
Moreover, President Biden did not recall finding classified information about Afghanistan downstairs in his Virginia home when he met with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer.
Additionally, the president recalled there were two times boxes relating to his office were delivered to his garage. The FBI retrieved these boxes when they searched his Wilmington, Delaware, home last year.
“I remember moving boxes, literally physically moving them, with help, one side to the other so I could get the Corvette in that garage on the left,” President Biden told Mr. Hur.
Driving Corvette
President Biden talked for some time about driving his Corvette, and that the Secret Service did not allow him to drive it past his driveway. He noted that he used it when he was on TV with famed comedian Jay Leno.
At least, said President Biden, he got to go behind the wheel, as the vice president has gotten to drive a bit as the occupant of the Oval Office.
“Probably one of the best parts to being Vice President and President, I get to drive all these, you know, electric vehicles. I have,” he said. “Damn, they’re quick.”
Interestingly, President Biden recalled having files on topics such as Black Lives Matter. The president, who is Catholic, even joked that after his vice presidency, he kept in touch with the Pope.
During the interview, the president even recalled making a “bad joke” with President Obama.
“The bad joke is, with President Obama, I would always say to him, Mr. President, all politics is personal,” he said.
“For example, even my staff wondered why the hell I’m calling Cory Booker to make sure he’s safe,” he continued, referring to the Democrat New Jersey senator.
Finally, at the end of the interview, President Biden joked that a book could be made about the questioning.
“I know it’s a lot of work for you—putting a lot together. I may now write a book,” he said.
Mark Tapscott contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times
