Biden special counsel interview transcript casts new light on president’s memory about son Beau’s death

Transcripts of President Biden’s two-day interview with Department of Justice investigators shows Mr Biden having far more accurate recall and command of past events than was described in the report authored by Special Counsel Robert Hur.

The transcripts of the interviews, which were obtained by The Independent, were conducted on 8 and 9 October of last year at the White House, just one day after the 7 October terror attacks on Israel by Hamas.

They span 268 pages and paint a far more nuanced picture of Mr Biden’s faculties than was depicted by Mr Hur, a former Trump administration appointee who Attorney General Merrick Garland brought on as a special counsel to investigate how classified documents ended up at Mr Biden’s former Washington, DC office and his Wilmington, Delaware home.

In his report, which Mr Garland released last month, Mr Hur stated that he declined to charge Mr Biden for mishandling the documents at issue and said he did not believe a jury could be convinced to convict beyond a reasonable doubt.

But the Republican prosecutor cast the 81-year-old president in an unflattering light, painting him as unable to remember specific dates, such as when his late son, Beau Biden, passed away from brain cancer, and describing him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”.

Republicans have pounced on the allegations to bolster former president Donald Trump’s unfounded claim that Mr Biden is senile and unfit to serve, while Democrats and legal experts criticised Mr Hur for including the extraneous and derogatory information in a memorandum about a person who was not being charged with a crime.

Yet the transcript appears not to match up with how Mr Hur described Mr Biden, particularly with