‘Gratuitous, inaccurate’: White House disputes special counsel report on Biden

Democrats and the White House on Friday launched an aggressive push back against a special counsel report that pushed Joe Biden’s age and memory to the front and center of the presidential election campaign and spurred a series of Republican attacks on the US president.

The special counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of confidential documents on Thursday said the US president would not face criminal charges in the case but in a series of remarks characterized Biden as elderly and with a failing memory – triggering a political bombshell on an issue seen as a core weakness of Biden’s re-election campaign.

“He gets it. He gets how he’s viewed. He gets what people see and what’s written about him and what the American people also see. But there are other things to know,” the White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said, pointing to reports that the former Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy considered the president a sharp negotiator.

In an unusually lengthy question and answer session with the White House press corps other Biden administration officials also joined the chorus of voices defending the president, his lengthy legislative record in his first term as president and his handling of a multitude of crises – both domestic and foreign.

The White House spokesperson Ian Sams said he fundamentally disagreed with the special counsel’s description’s of Joe Biden’s ability to recall details. “I dispute that the characterizations about his memory in the report are accurate, because they’re not,” he said as he and Jean-Pierre faced a barrage of questions on the issue.

Sams also indicated that it was possible transcripts of Biden’s interviews with Hur’s team could be released. The transcripts could shine some