Biden blocks release of interview tapes showing his ‘poor memory’
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Joe Biden has blocked the release of interview tapes in which he showed “poor memory” and behaved like a “well-meaning, elderly man”.
The US president used his powers of executive privilege to stop audio files from an interview with a federal prosecutor from being released to Congress.
Mr Biden, 81, was interviewed last year by Robert Hur, a special prosecutor appointed to investigate claims he had illegally stored classified documents in his garage after serving as vice president from 2009 to 2017.
Mr Hur later raised concerns about Mr Biden’s memory, suggesting he had forgotten the dates he had served in Barack Obama’s administration and the year of his son’s death.
In a report released in February, Mr Hur recommended that Mr Biden was not prosecuted because a jury would find him to be a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”.
Committees investigate
Although the transcripts from the interviews have been published, Mr Biden has stepped in to prevent the audio files taken by Mr Hur’s team from being released.
The justice department told Congress on Thursday that the Biden administration would not comply with a subpoena for the tapes, issued by the House judiciary committee and the House committee on oversight and accountability.
The committees are investigating the matter after some Republicans accused Mr Hur of deliberately overlooking Mr Biden’s alleged wrongdoing for political reasons. Mr Hur denies that claim.
In a letter to the Republican leaders of the committees, the White House’s top lawyer said the tapes had been requested to fuel a politically-motivated investigation into Mr Biden, and that their release could jeopardise future investigations.
“The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal — to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes,” Ed Siskel, the White House’s chief counsel, wrote.
“Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally-protected law enforcement materials from the Executive Branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate.”
Fresh questions over Biden’s mental acuity
Carlos Uriarte, head of the justice department’s office of legislative affairs, said the government had a “responsibility to safeguard the confidentiality of law enforcement files where disclosure would jeopardise future investigations”.
The decision to block the tapes was taken on the advice of Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, who advised Mr Biden that they could make White House officials less likely to cooperate with future investigations.
“The committees’ needs are plainly insufficient to outweigh the deleterious effects that productions of the recordings would have on the integrity and effectiveness of similar law enforcement investigations in the future,” he wrote on Wednesday.
Mr Hur’s report, which ran to more than 300 pages, raised fresh questions about Mr Biden’s mental acuity, following months of reports of his public verbal slip-ups and “senior moments”.
In a fiery press conference after the report, Mr Biden insisted his interviews had been mischaracterised by Mr Hur – before committing another gaffe by confusing the presidents of Mexico and Egypt.
He said that the interviews had been conducted shortly after Hamas’s terror attacks on Israel on Oct 7, and that he had been working long hours to deal with the fallout of the incident.
Mr Biden’s age has become a major talking point in the early stages of the 2024 election campaign, with a majority of voters reporting they believe he is too old to serve a second term.
Mr Biden is almost neck-and-neck with Donald Trump in national polls, but trailing in many of the swing states where he must win support to continue as president after November’s election.
