White House officials on Friday called the special counsel’s report on President Biden’s handling of classified material politically motivated, stepping up their efforts to discredit a document that characterized the president as elderly and forgetful.
Vice President Kamala Harris suggested the report was more of a political attack than an unbiased legal document. Ian Shams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, said it was “inappropriate” and “disturbing.”
The statements are part of an effort to dismiss a report by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to investigate how classified material from Mr. Biden’s time as vice president ended up in his Delaware garage. and an office in Washington.
The report, released Thursday, found that “criminal charges are not warranted,” a conclusion that was immediately overshadowed by the characterization of the president’s memory. The report said Mr Biden, 81, was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and had “diminished abilities in advanced age”.
For a president whose primary political vulnerability is the perception of himself as a diminished figure, these descriptions amounted to some of the most devastating references to his age during his time in the White House.
Mr. Shams would not commit Friday to releasing transcripts of the interview — even with any classified information. “It’s a reasonable question, and there are confidential things and we’ll have to work through all of that,” he said. “We’ll take a look at it and make a decision.”
The report forced the White House into immediate damage control, with the president holding a press conference on Thursday to walk back his conclusions about his mental acuity. “My memory is good,” said Mr. Biden, who has for years struggled with questions about his age.
On Friday, Ms Harris described the report as “politically motivated”.
“The way the president’s conduct was characterized in that report could not be more factually incorrect and clearly politically motivated,” Ms. Harris said in response to questions from reporters at the White House.
Some Democrats also rallied to the president’s defense and accused Mr. Hurr, a former US attorney in Maryland who was appointed by Trump, of being biased and potentially violating Justice Department policy. The special counsel conducted 173 interviews, including with Mr. Biden and his top advisers, and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents.
Representative Daniel S. Goldman, Democrat of New York and a former federal prosecutor, denounced the special counsel’s “unnecessary and gratuitous jab at the president,” saying it seemed “a very partisan stunt.”
Biden’s response, in a sense, was straight out of a traditional White House playbook: When a prosecutor makes unflattering or damaging allegations, he counters by describing the prosecutor as partisan.
But Mr. Biden’s allies called the special counsel’s descriptions of the president’s age pointless.
Mr. Shams, of the White House Counsel’s Office, suggested that Mr. Hurr felt pressure to include the damaging descriptions of Mr. Biden out of the expectation that Republicans would attack him for not criminally indicting Mr. Biden.
“There’s pressure to criticize and make, you know, statements that maybe you wouldn’t make otherwise,” Mr. Shams said. “It leaves you wondering why some of these reviews exist.”
He added that the special prosecutor’s mission was to determine whether any criminal conduct occurred. “He found that he didn’t,” Mr Shams told reporters on Friday. “That was the find. The case is closed”.
But, politically, the case was far from closed.
The Republican National Committee quickly created a graphic with the report’s eight most brutal words — “well-meaning, old man with a bad memory” — grafted onto the Biden campaign’s logo. Chris LaCivita, a top strategist for former President Donald J. Trump, called the special counsel’s description of Mr. Biden “damning and conclusive.”
Asked if the White House planned to evolve its strategy to convince Americans that Mr. Biden was not too old for the presidency, Karine Jean-Pierre, a White House press secretary, said that Mr. Biden will continue to travel across the United States to speak directly to voters.
Democrats, meanwhile, made sure to go on the offensive.
“People are really going crazy,” said Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who recently appeared with Mr. Biden when he visited her state. “People think this is a cheap shot by a political figure.”
“It was designed to do exactly what it does: People try to create problems,” he added. “There are very perceptive, wise people who have wisdom and experience at 81.”
Referring to Mr. Trump, she noted that others close to Mr. Biden’s age faced 91 felony charges.
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania, dismissed the concerns as “one big burger for nothing.”
“Nothing changes from our side,” he said. “We will end up with the strict choice we will have. We can talk about Trump’s blunders and his age, or we can talk about ours — it doesn’t matter. Both sides are old, that’s a fact. If you want to argue that there’s something important between three or four years, I don’t think there’s anything important.”
Privately, some longtime Biden donors and supporters said there was a significant degree of concern in their circles after the exposure and Mr. Biden’s press conference performance. But there was no obvious outlet for that anxiety: They expect Mr. Biden to be the party’s nominee, win or lose.
Peter Baker and Annie Karni contributed reporting from Washington.
