The Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris has blasted a special counsel report that raised damaging questions over President Joe Biden’s age and memory as being a political hit-job.
“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and (was) clearly politically motivated,” Harris said when asked about special counsel Robert Hur’s report.
Africa Today News, New York reports that the report cleared Biden of mishandling classified documents but said the 81-year-old Democrat came across as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Harris, herself a former senior prosecutor, said the comments about Biden’s mental acuity in the report were “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate.”
Her comments marked a new line of attack for Biden and the White House, who while heavily criticizing the report had not yet trained their fire on the special prosecutor himself.
Hur was appointed by Republican then-president Donald Trump to be US Attorney for the District of Maryland in 2017 before being named by Biden’s attorney general Merrick Garland as special counsel in the documents case.
A furious Biden responded in a surprise address from the White House on Thursday night, saying “my memory is fine” and lambasting the special counsel for claiming that he was unable to remember even the date of his son Beau’s death in 2015.
Biden had again confused a European leader with a dead predecessor for the second time in a week, telling a campaign event he met Helmut Kohl four years after the German chancellor passed away.
The 81-year-old’s gaffe late Wednesday came days after he said he had spoken to long-dead French president Francois Mitterand, instead of current leader Emmanuel Macron, at the same G7 summit in June 2021 where he said he had met Kohl.