Last Thursday, the release the Hur Report detonated a political atom bomb over the 2024 presidential race, or that’s at least what it seemed like. Though Special Counsel Robert Hur said Joe Biden wouldn’t be charged for mishandling classified documents (like Donald Trump has), Hur in part rationalized that decision by detailing, at length, how the 81-year-old president appeared to have a “faulty memory” in interviews — including highlighting how Biden apparently couldn’t remember the year his son, Beau, had died. The fallout was instantaneous. Biden held a emergency press conference where he angrily refuted Hur’s claims. Pundits and blind quotes from panicked Democratic officials made big proclamations about the report and its inevitable consequences. And another big multi-day news cycle erupted over the question of whether Biden is too old to be, or get reelected, president.
Now that the dust has settled a little, here’s a look back at some of the analysis, commentary, and most compelling takes that have come out about what the Hur Report and the renewed focus on Biden’s mental acuity mean.
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The Biden team and many of their allies and supporters say Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report was partisan attack aimed in part at deflecting criticism from the right for not delivering charges against the president. Per Politico Playbook:
“It felt like a Comey moment for me.” That was the assessment of a top Biden campaign official watching special counsel Robert Hur’s report explode Thursday. … Like Comey, the Biden official argued, Hur put his “thumb on the scale during an election season.” …
“The prevailing feeling is that they poured all these resources into investigating — and we were very cooperative — and he’s the only special counsel investigation that’s ever not led to charges,” said one Democratic defender of the president. “And I think that there’s probably some frustration around that that led to this over-torquing: ‘So let me just shit on [Biden] about memory!’ And also crossing a line that very few people would ever think about crossing when it comes to Beau.”
Biden administration officials echoed these points in media appearances over the weekend, and there is reportedly palpable frustration within the Biden camp over how Attorney General Merrick Garland handled the investigation and final report as well. Former Obama administration officials criticized the report and Hur, too:
Special Counsel Hur report on Biden classified documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions.
Had this report been been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised.
Robert Hur clearly decided to go down the Jim Comey path of filling his report absolving Biden of criminal activity with ad hominem attacks, like calling him an "elderly man with poor memory." Not remotely subtle. Just a right-wing hit job from within Biden's own DOJ. Wild.
At Slate, Dennis Aftergut and Frederick Baron criticized Hur’s professionalism and legal rationale:
In interviewing Biden, Hur found the president’s memory of the events from 2017 less than clear, which he characterized as indicative of Biden’s age and mental acuity. Memories, however, about events six years earlier are often incomplete, even by witnesses much younger than Biden. Lawyers soundly advise witnesses to say “I don’t recall” if they have any doubt. Incomplete recollection was indeed part of Hur’s reasoning for concluding that the evidence failed the Justice Department’s standards for a prosecution. …
No doubt Hur provided fodder for Trump and his allies. Doing so was completely unprofessional. The American Bar Association standards of prosecution state: “The prosecutor may make a public statement explaining why criminal charges have been declined or dismissed but must take care not to … prejudice the interests of … . subjects of an investigation.”
For all the world it looks like Hur learned the wrong lesson from what happened with Hunter Biden’s special prosecutor, David Weiss, another Republican, after MAGA world went after Weiss for negotiating a plea deal with Hunter Biden that conformed to prior DOJ settlements of prosecutions for the same crimes. Hur seems to have had a goal of preempting similar attacks on him for exonerating Biden the father — by feeding red meat to MAGA wolves.
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At Just Security, Andrew Weissmann and Ryan Goodman do a close-read of the special counsel’s report and conclude that Hur had no case against Biden, and they point out that the subsequent media coverage of the report failed to reflect that:
The report finds that the evidence of a knowing, willful violation of the criminal laws is wanting. Indeed, the report, on page 6, notes that there are “innocent explanations” that Hur “cannot refute.” That is but one of myriad examples we outline in great detail below of the report repeatedly finding a lack of proof. And those findings mean, in DOJ-speak, there is simply no case. Unrefuted innocent explanations is the sine qua non of not just a case that does not meet the standard for criminal prosecution — it means innocence. Or as former Attorney General Bill Barr and his former boss would have put it, a total vindication (but here, for real).
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There has been a considerable amount of criticism of Biden’s furious demeanor at the post-report press conference on Thursday night, particularly from conservatives.
At the National Review, Noah Rothman writes that the president’s reaction demonstrated that he is both mentally diminished and mean:
Biden’s conduct since the Hur report has done little more than convey in no uncertain terms how devastating its conclusions are to the president’s political fortunes. If this impartial assessment of Biden’s decline from his own Justice Department could have been rebutted, it cannot be now. Biden might have set out to convince the nation that Hur’s conclusions regarding the president’s affable decrepitude were wrong. In the process, he only managed to refute the affable part.
His colleague Philip Klein adds that Biden’s anger also made him look unreasonable:
[I]t appears that Biden, or his handlers, seem to believe that having him show anger — yelling, lashing out at reporters, his staff, and the special counsel — would prove him to be energetic and mentally fit. But his tantrum accomplished the exact opposite. He came off like an elderly relative who isn’t ready to acknowledge that he can’t live independently anymore.
The American Conservative’s Daniel McCarthy thinks Biden is out of control:
If he were simply old and forgetful, he might still possess self-control in other respects—at least enough to listen to the advisors who must have recognized what a disaster this would be. That he didn’t listen is as important as what he said. … He overreacted to the report with this emergency press conference because he’s brittle and easily wounded. That, as much as his diminished memory, is a cause for concern in a man with the world’s most powerful military and administrative arsenals at his command. He’s not just scatterbrained, he’s panicked.
Former chief Obama adviser David Axelrod criticized Biden for getting testy with a CNN reporter on Thursday night who asked him how he planned to assure Americans that his age isn’t a problem. Per the Hill:
He brushed away a question from Lee about polling showing concerns about his age, calling it a matter of “opinion.”
“It’s the opinion of a lot of Americans who only see you in front of a camera,” Axelrod said of Biden. “They don’t see you in the situation room. They don’t see you in these closed-door meetings. And they are drawing their conclusions from what they see.” Axelrod said the Biden reelection campaign has “to strategize around that,” and noted, “I’m not sure that putting him in front of a group of hungry reporters shouting at him is the necessarily the best way for him to communicate.”
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Others, like TPM’s Josh Marshall, think Biden’s show of anger over the report wasn’t just appropriate, but something he should do more often:
It’s probably not lost on you that Donald Trump is basically permanently angry. And not just angry in response to particular events but the kind of perpetual and often peristaltic anger that in day to day life most people find threatening or at least off-putting. But we virtually never hear anything about the purported damage from expressions of anger when it’s Donald Trump. That’s not bias. It’s simply that it’s assumed. So it just doesn’t come up. It’s no longer policed. That’s just what Donald Trump does.
But there’s an additional factor that people don’t notice. Being responsive to this kind of press policing signals a basic weakness, a perpetual hedging, a practice of being controlled and responsive to the press chorus rather than indifferent to it. Trump’s able to work outside this framework of policing because he simply ignores it and because of that reporters decide it doesn’t apply to him. This isn’t just Biden. It’s not even just Trump. Democrats for a host of reasons tend to be far more responsive to this kind of policing. People want to see expressions of agency and power from political leaders. Trump’s ability to set the terms for how the press reacts and interprets his actions is itself an expression of power.
All of which is to say that it wasn’t just okay that Biden showed some anger. It was good. And he should do more of it. Both because people expect people to have normal and appropriate human responses and grow latent suspicions when they don’t see it but also because it’s Biden showing some energy and direction. They should put him in front of reporters and the cameras more, not less. If you are responding to the tut-tutting and line-drawing of the prestige media you’re losing. It’s as simple as that. You’re always either reacting or being reacted to. The latter is always better.
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Jonathan Alter believes Biden’s aides now need to maximize the public’s exposure to the president:
The way to deal with the now-widespread impression that [Biden] might be [senile] is to abandon the current strategy of minimizing public interactions and get people comfortable seeing him out there, even when they know he will sometimes mess up. The White House made a good start on this when he went before the press immediately after the Hur Report was issued. Even though he misspoke in describing Egyptian President Sisi as the leader of Mexico and used the word “press” when he meant “public,” the appearance was a net plus because he seemed feisty and in charge.
He also argues that such exposure will help defy expectations:
Politics is always about expectations. Note how Biden did well in the February 3 South Carolina primary by exceeding expectations on how he would do with black voters. With Republicans now routinely claiming he has dementia, every gaffe-free public appearance —especially when they include unscripted moments — will be scored as at least a minor success.
The New York Times editorial board wants a lot more Public Biden, too:
The president has to reassure and build confidence with the public by doing things that he has so far been unwilling to do convincingly. He needs to be out campaigning with voters far more in unrehearsed interactions. He could undertake more town hall meetings in communities and on national television. He should hold regular news conferences to demonstrate his command of and direction for leading the country. … [T]he combination of Mr. Biden’s age and his absence from the public stage has eroded the public’s confidence. He looks as if he is hiding, or worse, being hidden. The details in Mr. Hur’s report will only heighten those concerns[.]
And Politico reports that many Biden allies agree, like former Hillary Clinton adviser Philippe Reines:
I would flood the zone, and I felt the same with Hillary. Because if you don’t, then the smallest thing becomes too easy for people and the media to focus on. The answer to the president is not to put him out there zero times to prevent zero things. It’s to go out there, and have him say whatever it is.
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At the Atlantic, Yair Rosenberg emphasizes that anyone who has followed Biden’s political career knows he’s always been bad at getting the little details right:
In response to a question about Gaza [on Thursday night, Biden] referred to the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the president of Mexico. The substance of Biden’s answer was perfectly cogent. The off-the-cuff response included geographic and policy details not just about Egypt, but about multiple Middle Eastern players that most Americans probably couldn’t even name. The president clearly knew whom and what he was talking about; he just slipped up the same way [Mike] Johnson and so many others have. But the flub could not have come at a worse time. …
But the truth is, mistakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slate laconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”
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Hur did his version of Comey's "I have no case but need to slap 'em around a little" routine
as for Biden's mental fitness, I talked to him one-on-one at the White House 10 days before Hur did
here's the video; judge for yourselfhttps://t.co/uZHiWLjCo6
Pod Save America host and former senior Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer notes on his Substack that “Hur’s pejorative portrait doesn’t match how everyone else describes their interactions with the President”:
Rumor and innuendo are the official currency in political Washington. Beltway types love to dial up reporters and give them the latest dish. There are few secrets in that town, and if Joe Biden acted like Hur says, we would all know. Biden meets with dozens of people daily — staffers, members of Congress, CEOs, labor officials, foreign leaders, and military and intelligence officials. Many of these people are not even Biden supporters. Some are Republicans who will pull the lever for Trump in November. If Biden was regularly misremembering obvious pieces of information or making other mistakes that suggested he was not up to the job, it would be in the press. Washington is not capable of keeping something like that secret.
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Reporters have reached out to a number of neurologists and other experts on memory and aging since the Hur Report came out. Overall, they have have emphasized that a person’s cognitive abilities cannot be accurately assessed based on anecdotes, and with that acknowledged, there wasn’t anything particularly concerning or unusual about the the president’s memory lapses as detailed in the report.
As several doctors made clear to the New York Times, neither they — nor Special Counsel Hur, nor any pundits — are in a position to diagnose Biden, and Hur’s conjecture on the matter (that Biden has a “faulty memory”) was definitely not based on science:
In its simplest form, the issue is one that doctors and family members have been dealing with for decades: How do you know when an episode of confusion or a memory lapse is part of a serious decline? The answer: “You don’t,” said David Loewenstein, director of the center for cognitive neuroscience and aging at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. The diagnosis requires a battery of sophisticated and objective tests that probe several areas: different types of memory, language, executive function, problem solving, and spatial skills and attention. The tests, he said, determine if there is a medical condition, and if so, its nature and extent.
A diagnosis might also require comparing recent memory test results to ones taken at least several years ago; understanding what precisely a person is and isn’t forgetting; interviewing family members and close associates; and ruling out various other factors that could be affecting a patient’s cognitive function, like medication they are taking or a recent injury.
And “neurologists say blanking on the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past, especially when under stress, can simply be part of normal aging,” reports NBC News:
“If you asked me when my mother passed away, I couldn’t necessarily tell you the exact year because it was many years ago,” Dr. Paul Newhouse, clinical core leader for the Vanderbilt Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, said. Almost every older patient has trouble remembering people’s names, Newhouse said. “I think it’s by far the most universal complaint of every person as they age[.”] …
Dr. Dennis Selkoe, co-director of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, agreed that forgetting names doesn’t actually provide much insight into potential memory problems. In fact, stress and a lack of sleep, can interfere with memory, no matter how old someone is. “Naming proper nouns is not an adequate basis to make a conclusion about whether an individual has a more consistent and more concerning substantive progressive memory disorder,” Selkoe said. …
Overall, neurologists tend to worry less about a patient’s ability to remember remote memories from many years ago and more troubled by an inability to recall more recent events.
And while everyone’s memory declines as they age, and recalling dates and names can become more challenging, it’s not necessarily some universal impairment, as several experts explained to the Washington Post:
“It’s very clear that there are a number of changes that occur with aging and cognition that are just part of getting older,” said Bradford Dickerson, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, who’s studied cognitive super-agers. Declines in the ability to think and remember among the elderly are broad and almost universal, he continued. “There’s just not much cognitively that’s better in an 80-year-old than in a 20-year-old.” …
Still, older brains can often compensate for their growing weakness, Dickerson and other researchers point out. “There’s evidence that older adults can strategically focus memory” on the most important information, [Harvard University psychology professor Daniel] Schacter said. Older brains often become more adept than younger brains at filtering irrelevant information or at making connections between experiences, the researchers agreed, because they’ve had more of them.
Joel Kramer, the director of the Memory and Aging Center at University of California, San Francisco, made a similar point to Stat News:
On average, an 80-year-old will not remember as well as a 60-year-old who won’t be remembering quite so much as a 40-year-old. But these are just general trends. And, you can’t really assume that this particular 80-year-old is going to remember less well than the average 40-year-old, or any 40-year-old. …
When there’s a considerable amount of disease, you might expect a more broad-based decline in memory as well as other [mental] skills. But they are really quite dissociable. And in fact, one of the ways that a lot of older people compensate for their memory problems is by having very good reasoning and planning and judgment. Some people argue that as we get older, you see an increase in wisdom and judgment.
There was a great study of airline pilots several years ago that showed that older pilots have slower reaction times, unquestionably, but they have more experience and better judgment. So this whole notion that because someone is 80 years old, they therefore have problems in memory and other skills, is completely bunk.
In a New York Times op-ed, Dr. Charan Ranganath, the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at U.C. Davis, stresses that “there is forgetting and there is Forgetting”:
If you’re over the age of 40, you’ve most likely experienced the frustration of trying to grasp hold of that slippery word hovering on the tip of your tongue. Colloquially, this might be described as ‘forgetting,’ but most memory scientists would call this “retrieval failure,” meaning that the memory is there, but we just can’t pull it up when we need it. On the other hand, Forgetting (with a capital F) is when a memory is seemingly lost or gone altogether. Inattentively conflating the names of the leaders of two countries would fall in the first category, whereas being unable to remember that you had ever met the president of Egypt would fall into the latter.
Over the course of typical aging, we see changes in the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a brain area that plays a starring role in many of our day-to-day memory successes and failures. These changes mean that, as we get older, we tend to be more distractible and often struggle to pull up the word or name we’re looking for. Remembering events takes longer and it requires more effort, and we can’t catch errors as quickly as we used to. This translates to a lot more forgetting, and a little more Forgetting. Many of the special counsel’s observations about Mr. Biden’s memory seem to fall in the category of forgetting, meaning that they are more indicative of a problem with finding the right information from memory than actual Forgetting.
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A great many Biden supporters have been pointing out that the stakes of the upcoming election outweigh concerns over the president’s memory or age, like this succinct comment from writer Dan Amira:
I guess I would still rather have a guy who gets dates and names wrong than a guy who gets abortion, climate change, guns, health care, civil rights, and democracy wrong.
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Intelligencer’s Ed Kilgore argues that, comparing Biden and Trump, both Biden’s temperament and experience are advantages when it comes to being an elder leader:
[I]f a second-term President Biden becomes significantly afflicted by age or illness, his lapses are likely to be as mild-mannered as the man himself. I don’t think you can say the same about a second-term President Trump, who already seems to suffer from the malady once maliciously called “Irish Alzheimer’s” (or in some lore, “Appalachian Alzheimer’s”), wherein the victim remembers nothing but his grudges. …
[T]he thing so often forgotten when we obsess about the age of our leaders is that there are qualities associated with what the AARP used to euphemistically call “modern maturity” that offset whatever is actually lost when an old goat “loses a step”: most obviously work experience, but also lived historical perspective, a wide range of useful role models and “best practices,” knowledge of personal limitations, and even fires of ego-driven ambition tamped down by accomplishment. I know I’m a better political writer for having observed multiple eras of American politics, dating back to the day in 1960 when I watched John F. Kennedy barnstorm through my small Georgia hometown. It should be obvious that Joe Biden learned something in his famously lengthy career in public office[.]
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Actuarial curves suggest near-certain further decline. (Voters may not look at actuarial curves, but they do have plenty of experience with older relatives.) "Not great, not terrible" now implies performance below a certain threshold (for the toughest job in the world!) later.
New York Times columnist David French thinks Biden and his team need a wake-up call:
Trump is a corrupt and confused 77-year-old who’s facing trial on dozens of felony counts in four separate criminal cases and has recently been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. But I can know that Biden would be far better than Trump and still be concerned that he’s not up to the challenge of governing for four more years. “Better than Trump” doesn’t mean that he’d continue to respond to profound foreign and domestic challenges with clarity and energy. “Better than Trump” doesn’t mean we can count on him finishing a second term. “Better than Trump” doesn’t even necessarily mean that he can beat Trump in November.
Compounding the problem for Biden, age is not a challenge that improves with time. It’s likely that Biden’s memory and energy are better now than they’ll be next year, not to mention four years from now. Moreover, millions upon millions of Americans have direct experience with the challenge of advanced age — either as their own minds and bodies ultimately slow down or as they watch it happen to friends and relatives. That same experience makes Americans immune to political spin on the issue. No matter how powerful your rhetoric, you can’t browbeat Americans out of a concern as obvious and relatable as the fact that age matters.
Analyst Nate Cohn explains that when it comes to Biden’s age, “there’s no doubt that voters have concerns, but it’s very hard to figure out how much support it’s costing Mr. Biden in the polls”:
The age issue is not like the economy, in which easily measurable data helps us make sense of its import. We know 10 percent inflation or 10 percent unemployment could be sufficient to cost a president re-election. We’ve seen it before, based on decades of hard data. In contrast, the severity of Mr. Biden’s age problem is almost entirely up for debate. That perception is mostly subjective — based on how he appears and sounds, not simply based on the fact of his being 81. (Mr. Trump is 77.)
Superficial and subjective issues like these are hard to analyze, as evidenced by the very wide range of responses to Mr. Biden’s news conference on Thursday. Even a question as simple as “why do voters think Biden is too old, but not Mr. Trump?” is hard to answer. It’s clear voters believe so, but the likely explanation is just as superficial and subjective as the feelings of individual voters. Subjective, of course, does not mean unimportant. Even the most superficial factors like appearance or voice depth can play a powerful role in vote choice. Mr. Biden seems to have crossed an invisible line demarking whether a candidate isn’t just old but “too” old in the view of many voters; Mr. Trump has not.
What’s more, the questions about Mr. Biden’s age are almost entirely without precedent in the era of modern elections. There has never been a president who has faced this level of concern about his age — not even Ronald Reagan in 1984, who was eight years younger than Mr. Biden this cycle. That’s exactly why it’s easy to imagine how concerns about his age might be politically potent. But it also means we’ve never observed the political effect of something like this before.
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