Vice President Kamala Harris furiously defended Joe Biden’s leadership and criticized special counsel Robert Hur for taking “gratuitous” photos of his memory lapses.
Harris came to the president’s defense hours after her own angry news conference, where she said her memory is “fine” and criticized Hur’s office for including information that she couldn’t remember the year her son Beau died.
‘So the way the President’s conduct was characterized in that report could not be more factually wrong. And clearly, for political reasons. Free,’ he said. “So I will say that when it comes to the role and responsibility of a prosecutor in a situation like that, we should expect there to be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.”
It was the most direct White House attack on prosecutors’ conduct allowed by Hur, whom Biden noted Thursday is a Republican.
Vice President Kamala Harris criticized the “politically motivated” and “gratuitous” information that special counsel Robert Hur included in his report on Biden regarding possession of classified documents.
She said during an event that she was “glad” a journalist asked a question about it.
‘Listen, I have had the privilege and pride of serving as Vice President of the United States with Joe Biden as President of the United States. And what I saw (in) that report last night, I think, is as a former prosecutor, the comments that that prosecutor made, gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate,’ he said.
Harris noted, as Biden did previously, that the president conducted interviews for two days immediately after the Hamas attack on Israel.
His defense came even as some Biden critics said damaging claims about Biden’s memory showed he was unfit for office. Some even called for the 25th Amendment to be used for his temporary removal, a process that would put Harris in charge temporarily.
‘October 7: Israel experienced a horrible attack and I will tell you that we received the calls. The President and I in the hours after that happened. It was an intense moment for the Commander in Chief of the United States of America and I was in almost every meeting with the President in the hours and days that involved countless hours with the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the heads of our intelligence community.’
Harris issued an impassioned defense of Biden’s capabilities hours after the president’s own angry news conference.
She vouched for Biden’s conduct in all of this. ‘The president was front and center, asking questions and demanding that the US military, intelligence community and diplomatic community find out and know how many people had died. How many Americans are there, how many hostages is the situation stable? He was in charge of everything. “Coordinate and direct the leaders who are in charge of America’s national security, not to mention our allies around the world,” she said.
His own emphatic defense came after Biden, in his own news conference, criticized prosecutors and rebuffed journalists, before speaking ill of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi during his response to a closing question.
Biden Biden dropped the F-bomb in a rant to a small group of Democratic leaders after special counsel Robert Hur wrote in an explosive report that the “elderly” president couldn’t remember when his son Beau died.
The shocking details were included in Hur’s 388-page report released Thursday about Biden’s “intentional mishandling” of classified documents.
According to the report, Biden could not remember when his son Beau died, “not even within a few years.”
The president did not react well to the embarrassing details.
He swore in front of a handful of lawmakers before his speech at the House Democrats’ retreat in Virginia on Thursday, sources told the Associated Press.
‘Do you think I would forget the day my son died?’ Biden was reportedly furious.
Beau Biden, the president’s eldest son, died in 2015 from a brain tumor. He was 46 years old at the time of his death.
Biden with his son Beau, who served as Attorney General of Delaware, at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008.
Then-Vice President Biden stands with his family near a heart before his son Beau’s funeral on June 6, 2015. Beau Biden died of a brain tumor at the age of 46.
While Hur said in the report that he would not press charges against Biden, the report gave a scathing description of an 81-year-old president with “diminished faculties and a defective memory.”
Biden further lashed out at the characterization of his mental abilities and claims about his son Thursday night in a hastily announced news conference at the White House.
‘How the hell dare you bring that up? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought, ‘It was none of his business,'” Biden said of the special counsel.
Biden seemed emotional when talking about his son, noting that he has carried his son’s rosary every day since Beau’s death.
“Every Memorial Day we hold a memorial service for him, attended by friends, family and people who loved him,” Biden said in the reporters’ room. ‘I do not need anyone. I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.
Biden, speaking at the White House on Thursday, said he thought it was “none of his business” when investigators asked him about his son Beau in the classified documents probe.
Biden reportedly became enraged at mention of the classified documentary report that he forgot when his son died before a group of House Democrats before speaking to House Democrats in VA.
An image from Biden’s classified documents report showing a damaged box where classified documents were found in President Biden’s garage in 2022.
Throughout Biden’s fiery remarks Thursday, he continued to reject the special counsel’s scathing description of his mental acuity, at one point responding to a question: “my memory is fine.”
Biden noted Thursday that he had sat through five hours of in-person interviews over two days for the investigation immediately after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7.
“I was in the middle of managing an international crisis,” Biden said.