Democrats work on damage control after Biden’s fiery surprise speech

Democrats and their allies were shaping a damage control response on Friday to a hastily organized White House press call the night before that appeared to fall short in its mission to reassure voters about Joe Biden’s mental acuity after it was harshly questioned in a prosecutor’s report about his having kept classified documents at the end of his vice-presidency.

Biden already said that his interview with the special counsel Robert Hur last October – in which he was reported to have forgotten the year his son Beau died and precisely when he had been vice-president – came in the days straight after Hamas attacked southern Israel, when Biden was preoccupied with the US response.

Hur’s report concluded on Thursday that Biden would not face criminal charges in the case, despite “willfully” retaining and disclosing classified material, which he would not be open to as a sitting president anyway but also would not be warranted even if he was no longer president.

But Hur then went on to describe at length how he found the US president’s memory to be failing, prompting anger from Biden and, in the following hours and into Friday, Democrats and aides to come to his defense.

“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated,” Kamala Harris told MSNBC on Friday.

The vice-president slammed claims of Biden’s failing mental acuity made in the 388-pages report as “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate”.

Earlier, Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin from the crucial swing state of Wisconsin addressed the conclusions by special counsel Robert Hur that the 81-year-old president’s recall was “significantly limited”, and that Hur would not bring charges