Did President Biden have memory problems?

TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 2024

It depends on who you ask: Did President Biden have memory problems when he met with Robert Hur?

The transcript of their interviews has been released, but it runs 250 pages. As we perused a few initial reports, we were struck by differences between the Washington Post and the New York Times concerning one high-profile matter.

Let's start with Matt Viser's instant report for the Washington Post. Headline included, this is the way it starts:

Full transcript of Biden’s special counsel interview paints nuanced portrait

President Biden was in the early stages of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur when the topic of Beau Biden came up—initially with Biden raising it and later as Biden was attempting to get his chronological bearings and wondered aloud when, exactly, it was that his son died.

“What month did Beau die? Oh God, May 30,” he said, naming the correct day, according to a transcript of the exchange reviewed by The Washington Post.

Two others in the room chimed in with the year, and Biden questioned, “Was it 2015 when he died?”

Not long after the exchange, Hur suggested they consider taking a brief break.

“No,” Biden responded, before launching into a long explanation of Beau’s death and its impact on him deciding not to run for president in 2016. “Let me just keep going to get it done.”

As Viser continues, he correctly notes a basic fact. Ever since Hur's formal report was released, "the exchange between Biden and Hur [about Beau Biden's death] has become one of the focal points" of subsequent pundit discussion.

As Viser notes, President Biden's comments about his son's death "led the special counsel to conclude that Biden would not be prosecuted for mishandling classified documents—in part because Biden’s 'poor memory' would make it difficult to convince a jury.

In fact, Hur's account of this matter was so imprecise that it almost sounded, at least to some, like President Biden couldn't remember the fact that his son had died, or couldn't remember the actual incident. Among pundits capable of greater precision, Hur's claim was paraphrased with greater accuracy:

The president wasn't able to remember the date—or perhaps the year—of his son's death.

This jumbled allegation became a major part of pundit reaction to Hur's poisonous claims about Biden's alleged memory problems. In the account which Viser provides, it almost sounds like Biden was sharp as a tack—like he instantly gave the correct date on which his son had passed away, with two others in the room quickly "chiming in with the year."

Viser opens with that topic. To our ear, his account makes it seem a bit silly to think that Biden's acuity would have been called into question on this slender basis.

To our ear, that's the way it sounds in the Washington Post. In the New York Times, Charlie Savage drew the assignment of scanning the lengthy transcript—and his account of this specific matter makes it sound somewhat different.

Indeed, Savage actually includes a fairly lengthy chunk of the relevant transcript—though we're not real sure it helps.

According to Savage, President Biden was asked "about where he kept papers related to work he did after leaving the vice presidency in January 2017." At that point, in response to that specific question, this fandango occurred:

BIDEN: Well, um … I, I, I, I, I don’t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?

HUR: Yes, sir.

BIDEN: 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 [sic] that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president. I’m not—and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point—even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for president. And, and so what was happening, though—what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30—

RACHEL COTTON, A WHITE HOUSE LAWYER: 2015.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.

BIDEN: Was it 2015 he had died?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: It was May of 2015.

BIDEN: It was 2015.

ROBERT BAUER, BIDEN’S PERSONAL LAWYER: Or—I’m not sure of the month, sir, but I think that was the year.

MARC KRICKBAUM, HUR’S DEPUTY: That’s right, Mr. President. It—

BIDEN: And what’s happened in the meantime is that as—and Trump gets elected in November of 2017?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2016.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: ’16.

BIDEN: ’16, 2016. All right. So—why do I have 2017 here?

ED SISKEL, BIDEN’S WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL: That’s when you left office, January of 2017.

BIDEN: Yeah, OK. But that’s when Trump gets sworn in, January.

SISKEL: Right.

BAUER: Right, correct.

BIDEN: OK, yeah. And in 2017, Beau had passed and—this is personal …

Savage includes that long chunk of transcript. On balance, we're not sure why. There's a bit of "Who's On First" to that passage, but we're not sure it tells us anything much worth knowing.

In this chunk of transcript, Biden starts by flatly miscasting the timeframe in which his son died. Quickly, things move onward from there. 

Memory and acuity-wise, is there anything of interest there, in these initial bits of confusion? We're not real sure that there is. 

That said, Viser's account in the Post makes this whole thing go down a whole lot easier. Maybe you had to be there, or maybe you have to hear the audiotapes.

Call no man happy until he's dead! The admonition is sometimes attributed the famous Greek statesman, Solon.

We also think of the joke we learned from Paul Reiser way back when. He referred to the joke as Goldberg's Law. To the extent that memory serves, it went a great deal like this:

The man with one watch always knows the time. The man with two watches is never quite sure.

 Hur's report included a widely-quoted political bomb. We can't quite tell you why.