Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are old and speak less fluidly than they used to. When speaking, both have a tendency to forget things or mix up names.
But though Trump is being prosecuted in four different criminal cases, he has not yet been unlucky enough to have a special counsel publicly weigh in on his mental fitness.
Biden's the one who now has that problem.
Special counsel Robert Hur was appointed to investigate why classified documents from the Obama administration were found at Biden's home and office in 2022. The documents were voluntarily returned to the government. But after their return (and amidst the investigation into Trump's classified documents), Attorney General Merrick Garland opened an investigation into how they got there and why, and eventually appointed Hur to oversee it.
Hur has now concluded his investigation by recommending no criminal charges.
He concluded that while Biden had "willfully" retained the documents, the evidence fell short of charging him with a crime, and that he would not have recommended charges even if sitting presidents didn't have temporary immunity.
Yet in his report, released Wednesday, Hur made repeated assertions about what he calls Biden's "faulty memory" and even "diminished faculties."
He says that when his team interviewed Biden last October, the president repeatedly failed to remember the years in which certain major life events happened — for instance, the years his vice presidency started and ended. "He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died," the report says.
Biden on Thursday night called an impromptu news conference where he angrily denounced the report and disputed its characterization of his mental acuity.
Some Democrats, meanwhile, said Hur's report seemed designed to hurt Biden politically. (Hur had served as a US attorney under Trump, though it was Biden's attorney general, Garland, who appointed him special counsel.) Biden's attorneys disputed that the president's "lack of recall of years-old events" was anything unusual, saying the report's framing of Biden's memory wasn't "accurate or appropriate."
The whole situation was strikingly reminiscent of when the Justice Department wrapped up the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails without charges — but with then-FBI Director James Comey's public criticism of Clinton as "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information.
This time around, Republicans have long been trying to push a narrative that Biden is downright senile — that his mental functioning is much worse than we know, that he's certainly much worse than Trump, and that the White House has been trying desperately to cover this up.
Hur's report may seem at first glance to bolster the GOP case. But on a closer read, the examples of Biden's poor memory or verbal mix-ups are similar to verbal flubs Trump has publicly made in recent months.
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