President Joe Biden was the impetus behind his prime-time address regarding special counsel Robert Hur‘s report into his handling of classified documents and his memory.
“It was the president’s idea,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday. “You saw the president out, do this, make a statement, take questions from all of you because he wanted to do it.”
In response to whether that was the correct decision, Jean-Pierre repeated that it was “important” to Biden and the White House to react to the report “on the day that it came out.”
“It was important for the American people to hear directly from this president and to lay out in a very forceful way what we thought about the special counsel report, what he thought about the special counsel report,” she said. “And not only that, he took your questions. He stood there and took questions from all of you. I think that’s important.”
As Republicans prepare to criticize Biden over the Hur report before November’s elections, Jean-Pierre could not provide an update on whether the White House would release the transcripts of Biden’s interview with the special counsel, adding the answer was “not a no” or “yes.”
“They’re discussing it. They’re looking at it. There’s a process that’s involved. The White House counsel has obviously taken these questions from all of you, and so they’re looking into it. I just don’t have anything further to say about that,” she said.
During his remarks, Biden offered a fiery defense related to his handling of classified documents but then exacerbated concerns with respect to his memory when he referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as the president of Mexico.
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“I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in the Gaza Strip has been over the top,” Biden said, according to the White House transcript. “I think that — as you know, initially, the president of Mexico, El-Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.”
Hur declined to prosecute Biden over his handling of classified documents because, he contended, a jury was likely to find him to be “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
