Biden fumes over special counsel claim he couldn't remember son's death

Former President Joe Biden on Thursday raged over special counsel Robert Hur's publication of a report in which he recalled interviewing the president and described his inability to remember basic facts about his life, including when his son, Beau Biden, died.

"There's even reference that I don't remember when my son died. How in the Hell dare he raise that. Frankly, when I was asked the question I thought to myself '[w]as it any of their damn business?'" Biden said. "Let me tell you something, some of you have commented-- I wear since the day he died, every single day the rosary he got from Our Lady of --- every Memorial Day we hold a service remembering him, attending my friends and loved ones. I don't need anyone to remind me when he passed away."

"He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended ('if it was 2013 - when did I stop being Vice President?'), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began ('in 2009, am I still Vice President?')," Hur wrote of the interview. "He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died."

Biden accounted for the apparent lapse in memory, by highlighting the circumstances of the discussion.

"Simple truth is I sat for a five-hour interview over two days of events going back 40 years. At the same time I was managing an international crisis," Biden said of his performance.

"The bottom line is the matter is now closed," Biden asserted. Throughout the press conference, he defended himself against allegations of failing memory.

"My memory's fine," he told one reporter.

"Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen," Hur wrote in his report. Biden pointed to the decision not to bring charges and insisted that the special counsel had exercised his own prerogative in making it.

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," Hur wrote. "Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter.