Special counsel to defend comments on Biden’s memory as transcript emerges

Robert Hur, the justice department special counsel assigned to report on Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents, will reportedly say he was just doing his job when he shook up the US election campaign by criticizing the president’s apparent inability to recall certain events.

In his report released in February, Hur, a former US attorney appointed by Donald Trump, recommended Biden not be charged for possessing classified documents. But he infuriated the president’s Democratic allies by making repeated references to Biden’s age and memory as one reason for not indicting him, because jurors would see him “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

A transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden, which lasted for hours over several days, seen by the New York Times shows the president fumbled occasionally with the sequence of events and certain dates, but otherwise was sharp throughout, and also corrected Hur and others when they made errors.

According to Politico, which obtained a draft of Hur’s planned remarks, he will say that his role was to determine whether Biden had “willfully” held on to classified documents. “I could not make that determination without assessing the President’s state of mind,” Hur planned to say. “For that reason, I had to consider the President’s memory and overall mental state, and how a jury likely would perceive his memory and mental state in a criminal trial … I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the President unfairly. I explained to the Attorney General my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do.”

Republicans said Hur’s conclusion that Biden should not be charged was evidence of double standards at the justice department. A