Biden ‘can’t remember when he was vice president’

Fears over president’s memory as report says he forgot dates in office under Obama

JOE BIDEN’S memory is so poor he struggles to recall when he was vice president or when his son died, federal prosecutors have said.

Lawyers who interviewed the US president in October as part of an investigation into his handling of classified documents found he had “hazy” recollections of his time in office under Barack Obama and struggled to remember key details.

A series of gaffes this week have raised concerns about 81-year-old Mr Biden’s cognitive abilities, including two speeches where he claimed to have spoken to former world leaders who had died several years earlier.

The lawyers’ report concluded that Mr Biden should not be prosecuted for mishandling the material as jurors would see the full extent of his mental decline and conclude he was simply a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, said the report was evidence that Mr Biden was unfit for the presidency.

“A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office,” he said.

The White House denounced the indictment of Mr Biden’s memory, saying the interviews with the lawyers were conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas Oct 7 attack.

Robert Hur, the Department of Justice’s special counsel, outlined in detail the gaps in Mr Biden’s memory.

“He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended, and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began,” Mr Hur wrote.

“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.

“Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.”

The report said that Mr Biden asked the lawyers interviewing him: “If it was 2013 – when did I stop being vice president?”. He also asked: “In 2009, am I still vice president?”

Mr Biden was vice president from 2009 to 2017 and his son Beau died in 2015.

On the matter of the documents, Mr Biden said he was “pleased to see they reached the conclusion I believed all along they would reach – that there would be no charges brought in this case and the matter is now closed”.

While Mr Biden has always been prone to gaffes, the publication of the report along with his latest string of remarks raise further questions on whether he is fit for a second term.

Speaking at two fundraisers in New York this week, Mr Biden told the same anecdote in which he referred to speaking to Helmut Kohl at a G7 summit in Cornwall in 2021, rather than Angela Merkel. Kohl died in 2017 and had not been Germany’s leader since 1998.

Delivering an almost-identical speech in Las Vegas on Sunday, the US president referred to “Mitterrand from Germany – I mean, from France” when he apparently meant to say Emmanuel Macron. Francois Mitterrand died in 1996.

Last night, Nikki Haley repeated her call for Mr Biden to take a mental competency test.

THE US Supreme Court appears poised to reject efforts to disqualify Donald Trump from the presidential race.

Mr Trump, speaking from Mar-alago in Florida, said it was “beautiful” to watch the first day of hearings into Colorado’s decision to rule him out of the state ballot. The former president had appealed against Colorado Supreme Court’s December ruling which found he should be barred from the ballot because of his role in the Jan 6 riot. During the two-hour hearing, both Republican and Democrat judges expressed concern about individual states having the power to take sweeping actions that would impact a presidential election nationwide.

Mr Trump did not attend the session, but told reporters he had watched the hearing and thought “it was a very beautiful process” and he thought his team’s “arguments were very, very strong”. While he decried the lawsuit as “election interference” by Joe Biden and the Democrats, he praised the nation’s highest court, which has six Republican judges to three Democrats.

“I’m a believer in our country, and I’m a believer in the Supreme Court,” he said. “You’re leading the country by a lot and can you take the person that’s leading everywhere and say, ‘Hey, we’re not gonna let you run?’ You know, I think that’s pretty tough to do, but I’m leaving it up to the Supreme Court.”

During the hearing, Chief Justice John Robert, a Republican, said if the Colorado decision is upheld, other states will proceed with disqualification proceedings of their own for either Democratic or Republican candidates.

“It will come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election. That’s a pretty daunting consequence.”

Besides this case, the Supreme Court may also agree to hear an appeal by Mr Trump of a lower courtruling that is not entitled to immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president and can be tried on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.