Prez forgot basic ‘fax’
Dates, even office tech
President Biden confused key dates during his October interview with special counsel Robert Hur, forgetting which year his son Beau died of brain cancer, as well as the year Donald Trump was elected president — even what a fax machine was, a transcript of the sitdown shows.
During a discussion of why he kept sensitive papers after leaving the vice presidency in 2017, Biden launched into a rambling explanation in which he said Beau, who died in 2015, was “deployed or is dying” after he left office in 2017.
“I don’t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?” Biden, who turned 81 in November, replied during the first of two days of questioning by Hur on Oct. 8 — when asked “where did you keep papers” after leaving office as vice president “when you were living at Chain Bridge Road” in northern Virginia.
“Remember, in this time frame, my son is — either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was — and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president,” Biden said, referring to President Barack Obama.
“I’m not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she [Hillary Clinton] had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did.”
Biden proceeded to ask: “What month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30 —”
At that point, White House lawyer Rachel Cotton and an unidentified man reminded Biden that his son died in 2015.
“Was it 2015 he had died?” Biden responded, according to the transcript.
“It was May of 2015,” he was told.
“It was 2015,” Biden repeated. Moments later, Biden referenced Trump’s election and asked if he had been elected in “November of 2017” rather than the previous year.
The president also twice forgot over the course of one day what a fax machine is.
“I have a library, and the library has a . . . a space for a copy machine, for — what do you call it, when they send these —,” the president said.
“Fax machine,” White House counsel Ed Siskel cut in.