Special counsel blows open debate over Biden age and memory: ANALYSIS

The legal headline — that President Joe Biden will not face prosecution in connection with his handling of classified documents, in stark contrast with the former president he is set to run against again — is not what carries the political punch.

Instead, the special counsel's extended rationale for why Biden would likely not be convicted is what immediately stirred up fresh questions about the president's ability to continue to do the job.

The

" target="_blank">report from special counsel Robert Hur found that «no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,» despite evidence that Biden retained classified documents related to Afghanistan policy from his time as vice president, and even shared them with a ghostwriter to aid in his memoirs.

Things get worse from there in Hur's accounting, drawing specifically on the recorded interactions the president had, voluntarily, with the special counsel's office. In the interviews last October, the president had «limited precision and recall,» according to Hur, who ultimately found that a jury would likely find Biden to be «a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.»

«Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt,» Hur writes. «It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.»

Specifically, Hur writes that Biden, now 81, did not remember when his time as vice president either began or ended; did not recall the date of his son's death «even within several years»; and had a «hazy» memory about key players in the Obama administration's