The report questioning Biden’s memory reignites a battle between Democrats and Republicans in Congress

Former special counsel Robert Hur’s appearance before a House of Representatives committee on Tuesday set the scene for two simultaneous battles. Eight months before the presidential elections, Republican and Democratic congressmen contended on behalf of the President of the United States, Joe Biden, and his predecessor, Donald Trump. In one battle, representatives were clashing over the handling of classified documents by both politicians. In the other, the memory and mental acuity of the two aging candidates was at stake.

Appearing at the Republicans’ request, Hur concluded that there were no grounds to charge Biden for improperly withholding classified documents after he left the vice presidency. However, his exculpatory report did enormous political collateral damage to the president by portraying him as “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and by pointing out that he did not remember when he was vice president or when his son died when he was questioned on October 7 and 8, which outraged Biden.

At times, the battle over the 81-year-old president’s memory has overshadowed the discussion about the classified documents. On Tuesday, Republicans played the video of Biden’s press conference in which he replied to the report and referred to Egypt as Mexico, aggravating the situation. The Democrats counterattacked with the 77-year-old Trump’s own nonsense, including a video compilation of the former president’s numerous lapses, like confusing Joe Biden with Barack Obama and Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and saying that Viktor Orbán is the president of Turkey. They also shared another video in which Trump repeatedly responded “I don’t remember” to questions in a deposition.

Prior to his appearance, Hur had delivered a transcript of the interrogation to Congress, with some fragments crossed out because they were classified as confidential. Reading the transcript also leads to different interpretations of Biden’s mental acuity. The president makes some jokes (“the FBI knows my house better than I do”) and answers most of the questions without any problem, but he also makes some mistakes and frequently claims not to know or remember the answer to the questions he is asked. However, Hur also credits him with a photographic memory about the layout of his house. Despite the slips in some isolated details, the full text allows one to question the accuracy of the report’s claim that the president has “significant limitations” in his memory.

Obviously, the most controversial aspect are the mentions of the date of his son Beau’s death and Biden’s time as vice president, which the special counsel highlighted in his report. The transcript shows that Biden recalls that his son died on May 30. Immediately, someone tells him it was in 2015, and he asks, “Was it 2015 when he died?” And he immediately says, “It was in 2015.″ But the transcript also makes it clear that Biden was the one who brought up his son’s death and, therefore, that he was mistaken when he reacted to the report by saying, “How in the hell dare he raise that. Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself [that] it wasn’t any of their damn business.”

The transcript also shows the context in which Biden questions the years he was vice president, which the prosecutor included in his report as a definitive sentence (he couldn’t “remember when he was vice president”). But the 51-year-old Hur himself misspoke at one point during his Tuesday appearance when he addressed Biden’s counsel Dana Remus as Obama’s lawyer; certainly, that wouldn’t be enough to claim that Hur doesn’t remember who the president is.

Moreover, the document indicates that the questioning began as Biden had just finished speaking with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the wake of Israel’s attack on Hamas. It also shows an energized Biden. On multiple occasions, when Hur suggested pausing, the president encouraged them to keep going: “I’ll go on all night if we get this done.” Biden has taken it upon himself to prove that he is fit to serve a second term. A medical report supported that claim a few weeks ago, and Biden passed the State of the Union test with flying colors as well.

Hur defended his report to Congress: “What I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe. I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the President unfairly,” he maintained, under fire from members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. “The evidence and the President himself put his memory squarely at issue,” he also asserted. Democrats have accused him of gratuitously questioning Biden’s memory and Republicans of favoritism for not bringing charges against the president. Hur left the Justice Department this week, so he appeared before Congress as a private citizen.

In the battle over classified documents, the indignation of the Republicans sounded somewhat phony, considering the much greater seriousness of the case that afflicts their leader, Donald Trump, who is charged with 40 crimes related to his retention of official documents in his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Joe Biden kept classified information. Joe Biden failed to properly secure classified information and Joe Biden shared classified information with people he wasn’t supposed to. Joe Biden broke the law because he’s a forgetful old man who would appear sympathetic to a jury. Mr. Hur chose not to bring charges,” said the committee chairman, Republican Jim Jordan.

Other Republicans, including Matt Gaetz, who sits on the committee, and Trump himself on social media, have preferred to focus on the Justice Department’s alleged double standard in not charging Biden and charging Trump. But Hur’s own report mentions the enormous differences between the two cases. Trump withheld a massive volume of documentation, including important defense-related secrets, disregarded requests to return papers when he was discovered, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ended up conducting a surprise search of his mansion, seizing secret documents Trump had tried to hide. In contrast, Biden (and earlier Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence) reported on his own initiative that he had discovered the papers and voluntarily agreed to a warrantless search of his home.

As an experienced prosecutor, Hur came out of the hearing unscathed, although he did not make either side happy.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition