White House spokeswoman says Biden ‘gets how he’s viewed’, downplays misspeaking
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has defended to reporters Joe Biden’s fitness to serve and ability to remember details, after comments from special counsel Robert Hur and instances of the president mixing up the names of world leaders.
“This is a president that … has had relationships with world leaders for more than 40 years,” Jean-Pierre said, after Biden yesterday evening mixed up the names of the presidents of Mexico and Egypt. “Has he misspoken, as many of us (have)?”
She also said Biden, 81, understands that voters are aware of his advanced age.
“He gets it. He gets how he’s viewed. He gets what people see and what’s written about him and what the American people also see. But there are other things to know,” Jean-Pierre said, referring to reports that former Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy considered the president a sharp negotiator.
Key events
Alice Herman
Wisconsin Democratic lawmakers defended Joe Biden in conversations with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, downplaying concerns about the president’s memory raised in a report by special counsel Robert Hur.
Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin instead emphasized Biden’s policy record, saying Biden has “shown time and again that he fights for Wisconsin’s working families and has a strong record of creating good-paying jobs, rebuilding our infrastructure, and lowering prescription drug prices.” Similarly, Democratic congressman Mark Pocan stated that Biden “got things done for the American people,” while Donald Trump “has used hate to try to divide this nation and in a way unseen before.”
Hur, who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents and concluded the president had willfully retained national security information, recommended against bringing charges against the president, saying Biden would come across to a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.
A Wednesday poll by Marquette University Law School found Trump and Biden in a dead heat in Wisconsin, with each carrying the support of 49% of registered voters.
The day so far
The White House is fighting back against special counsel Robert Hur’s comments that Joe Biden struggled to remember details of his life and career in an interview for his investigation into his possession of classified documents. Kamala Harris accused Hur, who said Biden should not face charges, of being “politically motivated”, while spokesman Ian Sams blamed Republican attacks on the justice department for putting pressure on the special counsel. He also noted that the White House was considering releasing the transcript of Biden’s interview, but has not decided yet.
Here’s what else has happened today:
-
The contest for the Senate got spicier, when relatively popular Republican Larry Hogan jumped into the contest for deep-blue Maryland’s open seat, and Matt Rosendale filed to unseat Democrat Jon Tester in red state Montana, despite losing to him in 2018.
-
John Cornyn, an influential Republican senator, said he would support legislation to fund Israel and Ukraine’s military, even if it does not include strict immigration provisions.
-
‘I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing’, Biden told reporters in a surprise speech yesterday evening, after Hur’s report was released.
White House spokeswoman says Biden ‘gets how he’s viewed’, downplays misspeaking
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has defended to reporters Joe Biden’s fitness to serve and ability to remember details, after comments from special counsel Robert Hur and instances of the president mixing up the names of world leaders.
“This is a president that … has had relationships with world leaders for more than 40 years,” Jean-Pierre said, after Biden yesterday evening mixed up the names of the presidents of Mexico and Egypt. “Has he misspoken, as many of us (have)?”
She also said Biden, 81, understands that voters are aware of his advanced age.
“He gets it. He gets how he’s viewed. He gets what people see and what’s written about him and what the American people also see. But there are other things to know,” Jean-Pierre said, referring to reports that former Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy considered the president a sharp negotiator.
Before he departed the podium, Ian Sams shared an unpublished detail of the report that he indicated supports Joe Biden’s argument that he was distracted when he spoke to the special counsel Robert Hur.
“What’s interesting about this, and this is oddly not in the report … at the beginning of his interview, the special counsel told the president: ‘I understand that you’re dealing with a lot of things right now, and I’m going to be asking you questions about stuff from a long time ago. I want you to try to recall to the best of your abilities.’ You know, things of that nature,” Sams said.
“That’s often what prosecutors would tell witnesses. So, you know, he understood that but the president was going to commit to being cooperative. He talked about this last night. He wanted to make sure he had everything he needed, and he didn’t want to throw up roadblocks.”
White House spokesman says memory characterizations in report ‘not accurate’
The White House spokesman Ian Sams noted his disagreement with the special counsel Robert Hur’s description’s of Joe Biden’s ability to recall details.
“I dispute that the characterizations about his memory in the report are accurate, because they’re not. And I think the president spoke very clearly about how his mind was on other things. I mean, he was dealing with a huge international crisis of great global consequence,” Sams said, referencing Biden’s argument that he was preoccupied with the fallout from Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.
Sams also described interviews by prosecutors as uniquely intense experiences:
I think there’s something important that people should remember about the way that, sort of, interviews like this happen. God forbid, you know, one of you guys ever have to get interviewed by a prosecutor … Witnesses are told, as I mentioned, by special counsel to do the best they can to recall or remember things, and they’re not supposed to speculate. They want facts. They want facts and evidence. And so, you know, I think probably in almost every prosecutorial interview, you can imagine that people have said that they don’t recall things because that’s what they’re instructed to do. So I think that’s just important context.
Joe Biden plans to appoint a taskforce to review how classified documents are handled during transitions between presidential administrations, White House spokesman Ian Sams said.
The subtext here is that Biden was not alone in possessing classified materials that he should not have. Mike Pence, a fellow former vice-president, also left the White House with government secrets, and was cleared of potential charges last year.
Donald Trump is, of course, facing criminal charges for not only taking classified documents but also hiding them from investigators.
Here’s what Sams had to say about what this new taskforce will do:
We had the issue with President Biden. Immediately after that, we had the issue with Vice-President Pence. And I think it’s important to understand that this is a common occurrence, and the president thinks that we should fix it. Like, he gave all these documents back, he knew … that the government should be in possession of these documents.
And so, what we’re going to do is the president’s gonna appoint a taskforce to review how transitions look at classified material to ensure that there are better processes in place so that when, you know, staffs around the building are roughly packing up boxes to try to get out during a transition as quickly as possible, at the same time … they’re still governing and doing matters of state. They’re going to try to make recommendations that that can be fixed, and he’s going to appoint a senior government leader to do that. We’ll have more on that soon.
White House spokesman Ian Sams also indicated that it’s possible transcripts of Joe Biden’s interviews with special counsel Robert Hur’s team could be released.
The transcripts could shine some light on some of the more jarring comments about the president’s memory Hur made in his report, such as that he could not recall the years he was vice-president, or when his son, Beau Biden, died.
“I don’t have any announcement on, you know, releasing anything today, but it’s a reasonable question and there are classified stuff and we’ll have to work through,” Sams said, when asked about the possibility of the transcripts’ release.
“We’ll take a look at that and make a determination,” he replied, when a reporter pressed him further.
White House blames Republican attacks on prosecutors for special counsel comments about Biden
Ian Sams, the White House spokesman for investigations, noted that Republican special counsel Robert Hur’s comments about Joe Biden’s memory and age came after months of attacks on the justice department and prosecutors elsewhere by the GOP:
We also need to talk about the environment that we are in. For the past few years, Republicans in Congress and elsewhere have been attacking prosecutors who aren’t doing what Republicans want politically. They have made up claims of a two-tiered system of justice between Republicans and Democrats. They have denigrated the rule of law for political purposes. That reality creates a ton of pressure and in that pressurized political environment, when the inevitable conclusion is that the facts and the evidence don’t support any charges, you’re left to wonder why this report spends time making gratuitous and inappropriate criticisms of the president.
The White House press briefing has started, and spokesman Ian Sams is at the podium.
He is reiterated that special counsel Robert Hur cleared Joe Biden of wrongdoing, and underscored that the president cooperated with his investigation. Thus far, Sams has refrained from condemning Hur’s conduct, as Kamala Harris and others have done.
The Biden administration’s counterattack to special counsel Robert Hur’s comments about the president’s age and memory will continue in a few minutes, when the White House press briefing begins.
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will be joined by Ian Sams, the White House spokesman who handles investigations of the president.
We’ll cover what he has to say, and what reporters have to say to him, live here.
Harris says special counsel comments about Biden’s memory were ‘politically motivated’
Kamala Harris has condemned special counsel Robert Hur’s comments about Joe Biden’s age and memory as “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate”, and noted that the president’s interview was conducted in the “intense” aftermath of the 7 October terrorist attack in Israel.
The vice-president’s comments were a strong denunciation of the language used by Hur, a Republican former US attorney appointed by attorney general Merrick Garland to investigate the discovery of classified documents at Biden’s personal residences. Hur determined no charges were warranted, but repeatedly noted that Biden could not remember aspects of his life and career in their interview.
Here are Harris’s full remarks:
VP Kamala Harris rips the special counsel’s report into President Biden’s handling of classified documents:
“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous.” pic.twitter.com/DO1M4ompYs
— The Recount (@therecount) February 9, 2024
Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator John Fetterman said he believes Joe Biden is still up to the job as president, and criticized comments about his memory made by special counsel Robert Hur.
“The president was very clear in that he is absolutely in full control,” Fetterman said, before turning to Hur’s lengthy report into the classified documents found in Biden’s possession that noted he could not remember some details of his life and career.
“That’s 350 pages to just say that Joe Biden isn’t going to be indicted here. It was just a smear job and cheap shots and just taking things out of context, or even just inventing any of them too,” Fetterman said.
Maryland’s Hogan and Montana’s Rosendale jump into Senate race, shaking up map
There have been a couple of interesting developments today in the contest to determine whether Democrats can maintain their slim hold on the Senate in November’s election.
Popular former Republican governor Larry Hogan jumped into the race for Maryland’s open seat. While his election would be an upset in a state Joe Biden won with 65% of the vote in 2020, Hogan has proven his ability to win statewide elections in Maryland before, and his candidacy will probably force Democrats to spend money there that they otherwise could have used elsewhere. Here are some thoughts on Hogan’s candidacy, from University of Virginia analyst Kyle Kondik:
Crystal Ball will be moving MD-SEN from Safe Dem to Likely Dem. My guess is Hogan leads early polls but generating the kind of ticket-splitting required is a huge lift — still a great development for Rs to expand the map a bit. https://t.co/r3hMq5d2mu
— Kyle Kondik (@kkondik) February 9, 2024
Democrats received slightly better news in Montana, a red state where the party is fighting to get senator Jon Tester elected again. Republican congressman Matt Rosendale today made his much-expected bid for Congress’s upper chamber official – but the GOP isn’t particularly happy about it, since Tester beat Rosendale in 2018.
Steve Daines, Montana’s junior senator and the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, had this to say about Rosendale’s entry:
It’s unfortunate that rather than building seniority for our great state in the House, Matt is choosing to abandon his seat and create a divisive primary. Tim Sheehy has my full support because he is the best candidate to take on Jon Tester. Whichever party wins the Montana Senate seat will control the United States Senate in 2024, and Republicans cannot risk nominating a candidate who gave Jon Tester the biggest victory of his career.