Mr. Biden expressed particular outrage at that line. “How on earth does he dare bring that up?” the president said at a news conference hours after Mr. Hur’s report became public. “Honestly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it was none of their damn business.”
The transcript shows that Mr. Hur did not specifically ask when Beau Biden had died. Instead, Mr. Hur pressed Mr. Biden about where he kept papers related to work he did after leaving the vice presidency in January 2017, such as teaching at a Washington think tank, a “moonshot” project against cancer and the book he wrote about Beau’s disease. dead.
At that point, Mr. Biden, who sometimes stutters, began stammering and garbled. He said “when I got out of the Senate” when he meant to refer to leaving the vice presidency, apparently conflating the events of 2015, when Beau died and Mr. Biden chose not to run against Hillary Clinton running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. , with events in 2017 when he wrote the memoir and decided to run for president in the 2020 cycle:
BIDEN: Well, um…I, I, I, I, I don’t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?
HUR: Yes sir.
BIDEN: Remember, in this time frame, my son – either deployed or dying, and, and he was – and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time I left the Senate were encouraging me to go into this period to participate, except the president. I’m not – and it’s not a mean thing to say. He just thought she had a better chance of winning the presidency than I did. And I wouldn’t have done that at this point either. Even though I’m at Penn, I still haven’t run away from the idea that I might run for office again. But if I were to run again, I would run for president. And so what happened: in what month did Beau die? O God, May 30 —
RACHEL COTTON, A WHITE HOUSE LAWYER: 2015.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.
BIDEN: Was it in 2015 that he died?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: It was May 2015.
BIDEN: It was 2015.
ROBERT BAUER, BIDEN’S PERSONAL LAWYER: Or – I’m not sure of the month, sir, but I think that was the year.
MARC KRICKBAUM, HUR Deputy: That’s right, Mr. President. It –
BIDEN: And what’s happened in the meantime is that – and Trump gets elected in November 2017?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2016.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: ’16.
BIDEN: ’16, 2016. Okay. So – why do I have 2017 here?
ED SISKEL, BIDEN’S WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL: That’s when you left office, January 2017.
BIDEN: Yeah, okay. But that’s when Trump is sworn in, January.
SISKEL: Right.
BAUER: Right, right.
BIDEN: OK, yeah. And in 2017 Beau had passed away and – this is personal…
Mr. Biden then talked about Beau’s death; how he came to write the subsequent book “Promise Me, Dad,” based on his son’s dying request to remain involved in public service; and how in 2017, after a rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, he decided to run for president against Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Biden had a number of other mistakes.
The transcript also contained some minor apparent errors that were not noted in Mr. Hur’s report. For example, Mr. Biden had to be prodded to remember the name of the federal agency that holds official documents — the National Archives — or that fax machine is the name of the device that transmits images of documents over telephone lines.
But Mr. Hur made a particularly striking claim, saying that Mr. Biden “couldn’t remember when he was vice president.” As evidence, Mr. Hur quoted him as saying: “If it was 2013 – when did I quit as vice president?” According to the report, Mr. Biden showed similar confusion on the second day of questioning by asking, “Am I still vice president in 2009?”