Biden gives dramatic surprise presser to address claims over memory loss: Live

An angry and animated President Joe Biden has hit back at a Republican prosecutor’s claim that his memory is faulty, during a last-minute and at-times chaotic press conference on Thursday.

Andrew Feinberg has the full story:

“THIS HAS NOW PROVEN TO BE A TWO-TIERED SYSTEM OF JUSTICE AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL SELECTIVE PROSECUTION,” Mr Trump said in a statement. “the Biden Documents Case is 100 times different and more severe than mine. I did nothing wrong, and I cooperated far more.”

Read more on the differences between Mr Trump and Mr Bidens’ cases:

This was by far the most damning aspect of the report just in terms of the effect it will have on public perception of the president. Robert Hur and his team repeatedly make reference to President Joe Biden struggling with remembering significant details about his life — including, heartbreakingly, the exact year in which his son Beau died. He also could not remember which years constituted his term as vice president.

At one point, investigators recall Mr Biden questioning aloud whether he was “still vice president” in 2009 (that was the first year of his term). He also, on the first day of interviews with Mr Hur’s team, asked: “When did I stop being vice president?” He also appeared, according to Mr Hur, to have trouble remembering more general facts about his time as vice president; during testimony about his work at the time on the issue of whether to surge US troops to Afghanistan, the president “mistakenly said he ’had a real difference’ of opinion” with a top general with whom historical records showed actually shared his opinion on the 2009 troop surge.

It’s the kind of candid, private revelation about the president’s mental fitness that will seriously undercut the president’s supporters as they try to make the case that he is up for another four-year term. Age and mental ability continue to be Mr Biden’s chief areas of concern as far as polls indicate.

Read more on the key takeaways from Mr Hur’s report:

Check out some of the key photos from Robert Hur’s report, from The Independent’s Ariana Baio:

Overwhelmed by the 388-page PDF document released by Special Counsel Robert Hur today?

From John Bowden, check out the key takeaways from Mr Hur’s report:

Robert Hur, anticipating comparisons between the two unrelated classified documents cases against Donald Trump and Joe Biden, addressed the issue in his special report.

“Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite,” the report reads.

“According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview. and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.”

Nikki Haley released a statement on the Special Counsel’s report.

“The double standard is glaring,” she wrote on X. “Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump were reckless with classified documents. If Biden’s defense is old age and forgetfulness, Trump can easily make the same claim. Trump should quickly hire Biden’s lawyers.”

Read more on why Mr Trump is being charged and Mr Biden is not:

The report found that materials Mr Biden retained from his time as Barack Obama’s vice president included “marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and notebooks containing Mr Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”

The decision stands in stark contrast to the decision by a grand jury to indict former president Donald Trump for keeping documents at Mar-a-Lago. Inevitably, the former president and his allies crowed about how a grand jury supposedly unfairly indicted the former president for his storage of classified documents related to national defence but not his successor.

Read more from Eric Garcia, Andrew Feinberg and Alex Woodward:

Authorities found some classified documents in the President’s garage — including a folder titled “Afganastan.”

Special Counsel Robert Hur found that the classified documents on Afghanistan were found in Mr Biden’s garage next to a dog bed and a broken lamp, among other things.

“We also expect many jurors to be struck by the place where the Afghanistan documents were ultimately found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood,” the report reads.