As of: March 13, 2024, 10:33 a.m
By: Stefan Krieger
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Joe Biden's age and health are the focus of the political debate.
The Republicans are using this as ammunition in the election campaign.
Washington, D.C.
– Joe Biden’s age and state of health are always the subject of speculation.
The opposition Republicans in particular have zeroed in on the US President's fitness ahead of the 2024 US election.
No wonder, then, that the House of Representatives was now confronted with this issue on the sidelines of a hearing on the so-called documents affair.
The special investigator into the documents affair involving the US President has once again defended his controversial assessments of the 81-year-old's memory during the parliamentary investigation.
“My job was to determine whether the president intentionally retained or revealed national defense information,” Robert Hur told the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday (March 12, local time).
Intentionally means “knowingly and with the intention of doing something that is prohibited by law”.
Assessment of Biden’s health status “correct and fair”
“For that reason, I had to take into account the president's memory and general mental state,” said the Republican lawyer, who worked in the Justice Department under Biden's predecessor Donald Trump and was then appointed federal prosecutor by Trump.
Hur asserted that his assessments were “necessary, correct and fair.”
He neither whitewashed nor “unfairly denigrated” the president.
In a report on Biden's documents affair published in early February, Hur ruled that the president should not face charges in the case.
But what made headlines was his assessment that the 81-year-old president was a “well-meaning, older man with a bad memory.”
Joe Biden: A “well-meaning, older man with a bad memory.”
© Evan Vucci/dpa
Democrats react testily to report on Biden's health
Biden and his Democrats reacted with outrage to this and similar passages.
The Republicans, on the other hand, used the quotes to deny Biden, who will run again against Trump in the November presidential election, the mental ability to hold office in the White House.
At the hearing in the House of Representatives, the Democrats were harsh on Hur.
The special counsel decided against prosecuting the president, but at the same time used his report to “taunt” Biden and “smear” the president, said Representative Hank Johnson.
“You can't tell me that you're so naive as to think that your words won't ignite a political firestorm,” said Democrat Adam Schiff.
"They're not dumb.
They knew exactly what they were doing.” Hur replied that “party politics” had no place in his work.
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Meanwhile, transcripts of Hur's questioning of Joe Biden were also published.
They paint a more detailed picture of the encounters.
In fact, Biden could not remember the year in which his son Beau Biden died of a brain tumor - but he could remember the day and the month.
Biden also asked at one point when Trump was elected president and twice about the dates of his own vice presidency under President Barack Obama.
Hur fielded questions from committee members from both parties, each of whom criticized him for either making Biden's mental fitness part of his investigation or for not judging him harshly enough.
Hur defended both his approach and his conclusions at the hearing.
At one point he said of Biden that he “did not exonerate” him.
Republican recommends “incapacitating” Biden
Republican Representative Nathaniel Moran had drastic words during the hearing.
Moran suggested Tuesday that Biden should be declared “incapacitated” because of his statements.
Moran provided his definition of a person who meets such a criterion: “An adult whose ability to effectively receive and evaluate information or communicate decisions is so severely impaired that he or she is no longer able to fully or fully manage his or her financial resources partly to manage”.
He continued, addressing Hur: “Frankly, I see a lot of overlap between what you laid out in your testimony, in your written report, and the definition here.
The wording is almost identical.”
Moran added that he was concerned that Biden was coming very close to the definition of an “incapacitated person,” given the details of the report.
Confidential documents found on Biden
Biden's documents affair involved confidential documents from his time as Obama's deputy between 2009 and 2017. The documents were found at the end of 2022 in an office in Washington previously used by Biden and then in his private home in Wilmington, Delaware.
Months earlier, in Trump's private estate Mar-a-Lago in the state of Florida, the US Federal Police FBI had confiscated hundreds of confidential documents that the right-wing populist had taken from the White House after the end of his term in office at the beginning of 2021.
Trump was impeached because of this.
Hur noted in his report that the Trump case had a completely different dimension than the Biden case.
The ex-president had partially refused to return documents and is said to have hidden them from access by investigators.
(skr with agency material)