Release the Biden transcript
With the Biden campaign’s forceful pushback against the Hur report’s allegations, in particular regarding Beau Biden’s death, there’s an easy way to resolve the matter: Release the transcripts and audio recordings of the interviews with the president.
Look, whether or not you feel special counsel Robert K. Hur, investigating Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents before becoming president, went beyond his assignment in his report’s comments about Biden’s memory, it isn’t as if Hur’s assessment sounded implausible. We’ve all heard Biden mention his recent conversations with long-dead foreign leaders.
We’ve seen him struggling to think of the right word, and we’ve seen him mix up dates and places in his public remarks.
Hur’s report even included a few verbatim quotes from Biden, such as, “If it was 2013 — when did I stop being vice president?” and “In 2009, am I still vice president?” The Biden team insists that Hur’s characterization is an inaccurate, unfair smear.
Note that Hur did not offer a verbatim quote when he wrote, “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” Obviously, that accusation enraged Biden; in the president’s news conference last week, Biden fumed, “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
The issue of Hur asking about Beau Biden’s death resonated with Democrats and the president’s supporters so intensely that first lady Jill Biden mentioned it in a recent fundraising letter to donors: “We should give everyone grace, and I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points,” she wrote in the email last weekend. “If you’ve experienced a loss like that, you know that you don’t measure it in years — you measure it in grief.”
Biden campaign officials told the Associated Press that Jill Biden’s message was the best-performing email to campaign donors since the president’s email launching his reelection campaign in April.
Except, apparently, that nasty invocation of Joe Biden’s darkest days didn’t happen the way the president described.
NBC News reported on Wednesday that, according to two people familiar with Hur’s five hours of interviews with the president over two days in October, it was the president, not Hur or his team, who introduced the subject of Beau Biden’s death.
The sources contended that the president mentioned his son’s death after being asked about his workflow at a Virginia rental home from 2016 to 2018, in the context of discussing what else might have been going on in his life at the time. (Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015.)
Perfect irony: Biden in his news conference last week either lied or misremembered events, while attempting to refute the accusation that he doesn’t remember events well. I’m reminded of September 2021, when the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Kenneth “Frank” Mckenzie, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, testified to Congress that they had recommended Biden maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. About a month earlier, in a contentious interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopolous, Biden said he didn’t remember anyone recommending that.
Stephanopoulos: So no one told — your military advisers did not tell you, “No, we should just keep 2,500 troops. It’s been a stable situation for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that”? Biden: No. No one said that to me that I can recall.
Sure, Biden might be lying. But the scarier option is that Biden is telling the truth — he doesn’t remember what was said in briefings months earlier.
With the Biden campaign’s forceful pushback against the Hur report’s allegations, in particular regarding Beau Biden’s death, there’s an easy way to resolve the matter: Release the transcripts and audio recordings of the interviews with the president.
If Hur is lying, the public ought to know that. If Hur accurately described a doddering president who has trouble remembering the dates of basic events, the American people have a right to know, too.
The White House — meaning Biden — can direct the Justice Department to make public the transcript or audio recording of the interview, or the president can claim executive privilege if a congressional committee demands them, as appears likely.
The process of releasing the information could be delayed, as it involved discussions of classified material, and some portions of the discussion dealing with those specifics might need to be redacted. But, given the circumstances, the process should be expedited.
It isn’t clear what Biden will do. But if someone lied about what you said and did, and you had a transcript to prove the accusation wrong, wouldn’t you want that transcript out there?
And if Biden and his team choose to not release the transcript … it is entirely fair to draw some conclusions about who is characterizing his testimony accurately.