President Biden’s interview last October with special counsel Robert K. Hur over his possession of classified documents is riddled with one phrase: I don’t recall.
The president, who was questioned on Oct. 8-9 about boxes of classified documents stored at his Delaware home and his former Washington, D.C., office, told Mr. Hur he could not remember, for example, why he held onto a classified memo about the Obama administration’s 2009 Afghanistan troop surge, according to a transcript reviewed by The Washington Times.
When Mr. Hur’s staff questioned Mr. Biden about a notebook he held onto containing classified information about Afghanistan, he wasn’t sure if he wrote in it while he was vice president.
The date on the notebook was April 20, 2009, about four months after Mr. Obama took office.
“Was I still vice president?” Mr. Biden asked in the interview. “I was, wasn’t I? Yeah.”
The interview is peppered with “I don’t recall” or “I don’t remember” when it came to why or how Mr. Biden took classified information or how he ended up holding onto it.
The memory lapses were so frequent, they became a main factor in Mr. Hur’s determination that the president would not face charges in the case, despite former President Donald Trump’s looming criminal case for storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home. Mr. Biden now faces a rematch in November with Mr. Trump.
In a report released last month, Mr. Hur, who is testifying to Congress about the matter on Tuesday, said Mr. Biden’s stash of classified documents “present serious risks to national security” but said he would not charge the president because he would appear before a jury to be “an elderly man with a poor memory” who would be difficult to convict.
The report raised new questions about Mr. Biden’s failing memory and his fitness for the office as he embarks on a campaign for a second term. Mr. Biden insists his memory is fine.
In the transcribed interview, the president does recall many details of events from more than a decade ago, including his reasoning for disagreeing with others in the Obama administration who supported the troop surge in Afghanistan.
During the interview with Mr. Hur, Mr. Biden said he wrote a dissenting memo “because I was trying to change the president’s mind and I wanted to let him know I was ready to speak out no matter unless he told me don’t say a word, I’m ready to speak out, and to really, quite frankly, save his ass on what was going on.”
Mr. Biden went on to detail his view of the Afghanistan situation and why he believed Mr. Obama was “being misled.”
Ultimately, Mr. Obama overruled Mr. Biden and went forward with the troop surge, which was largely deemed a success.
His detailed recollection disappeared when asked about his possession of the classified memo and why he held onto it.
“I don’t recall whether I — did I have this?” Mr. Biden asked Mr. Hur’s team. “Was it in my possession, this memo?”
He told investigators, “I don’t know that I knew, but it wouldn’t have — it wasn’t something I would have stopped to think about.”
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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