By Alexandra Márquez —
NBC News
Democrats defended the president, Joe Biden, on Friday and reproached the special prosecutor who investigated the handling of classified documents for being a Republican with a political agenda.
In his report, Hur declined to bring charges against Biden for the way he stored classified documents in his home and personal office after he became vice president.
But he also specified that the president presented himself in interviews with investigators
“as a nice, well-intentioned, elderly man with a bad memory”
and pointed out several moments in which the president had problems remembering specific dates.
Joe Biden at the White House, February 8, 2024.Mandel Ngan / AFP - Getty Images
Vice President Kamala Harris explained to reporters at a gun violence prevention event in Washington on Friday that the report was “inaccurate and inappropriate.”
“The way the president's behavior was characterized in that report could not be more factually flawed,” he said, adding, “And clearly politically motivated.”
“It's 350 pages to simply say that Joe Biden is not going to be impeached here as well.
“It has been a smear and a low blow
, taking things out of context or even making them up,” Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania, told reporters on Friday at a Biden-Harris campaign event on gun violence.
“It doesn't take 350 pages to say that... so clearly there was an agenda there,” Fetterman added.
Although Hur does not serve in partisan roles, he was appointed by Trump in 2017 as federal prosecutor for the District of Maryland.
Before that, he worked at the Department of Justice during the former President's Administration as a senior advisor to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
While some Democrats privately expressed concern about how the revelations in Hur's report would affect Biden's re-election campaign, others also publicly issued criticism of Hur.
Jim Messina, who ran President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, appeared to respond directly to the "old man with a bad memory" reference, which some Biden critics seized on.
“We need to stop treating a single line in a long, heavily editorialized report—in which no wrongdoing was found—by a partisan Republican investigator as if it were a greater responsibility than Trump's 91 criminal charges and being found responsible. of rape,” Messina wrote in a post on X.
Biden forcefully defended his mental faculties in a defiant speech Thursday night.
“My memory is fine,” he assured.
[Biden did not even remember when his son died, according to the special prosecutor. But he questions it: “My memory is fine”]
The president also criticized Hur for including characterizations about his memory in the report.
“I know that attention has been paid to some language in the report about my recollection of the events.
There is even a reference to the fact that I don't remember when my son died,” Biden told reporters.
And he added: “How the hell dare you raise that?
Frankly, when they asked me the question, I thought to myself that it was none of their damn business.”
Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who served in the Obama Administration, said in
Rep. Daniel Goldman of New York, who was the lead Democratic lawyer in the first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump, told ABC News on Thursday: “What everyone will soon realize is that this is a special prosecutor.” Republican who went completely out of his way to editorialize and include material in his report that is unnecessary and irrelevant to what he was charged with doing.”
Additionally, he also accused Hur of fueling Republican efforts to “create a false equivalence between President Biden and former President Trump.”
Then-U.S. Attorney Robert Hur arrives at U.S. District Court in Baltimore on Nov. 21, 2019.Steve Ruark/AP file
Alan Weissman, former FBI general counsel, told MSNBC on Thursday that the characterizations of Biden in the report are “totally inappropriate.”
Weissman added that it was not “the role of the Department of Justice ... to talk about his memory.
It is irrelevant, unfounded.
And it's also exactly what you're not supposed to do, which is put your finger on the scale that could have political repercussions.”
Other Democrats simply downplayed the concerns highlighted in the report, saying Biden's record
should speak for itself
.
At Friday's campaign rally, Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., the youngest member of Congress, indicated that voters would focus more on Biden's accomplishments as president.
"No.
1, yeah, okay, we know President Biden is old.
"It doesn't seem like breaking news to me," Frost told reporters.
And he added: “What seems like news to me is that 15 million jobs have been created, that salaries have increased and that inflation has decreased.
“That sounds like news, beating Big Pharma and putting a $35 cap on insulin, the bipartisan infrastructure law, the first gun violence prevention office.”