Special counsel Robert Hur defended the mentions of President Joe Biden’s memory in his report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, noting the president didn’t remember multiple relevant facts.
“There has been a lot of attention paid to language in the report about the president’s memory, so let me say a few words about that,” Hur said in opening remarks Tuesday to the House Judiciary Committee.
“My task was to determine whether the president retained or disclosed national defense information willfully. That means knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids. I could not make that determination without assessing the president’s state of mind. For that reason, I had to consider the president’s memory and overall mental state, and how a jury likely would perceive his memory and mental state in a criminal trial,” Hur testified.
“These are the types of issues that prosecutors analyze every day, and because these issues were important to my ultimate decision, I had to include a discussion of them in my report to the attorney general,” the special counsel continued. “The evidence and the president himself put his memory squarely at issue.”
“My assessment and the report about the relevance of the president’s memory was necessary, and accurate, and fair,” Hur added.
