In his press conference following the report on his retention of classified documents, Joe Biden lashed out at special counsel Robert Hur for saying the president has such “diminished faculties,” it would be difficult to criminally charge him.
One of the key and scripted moments was Biden angrily denouncing Hur for raising his son’s death.
Many in the media eagerly replayed the clip the next day, calling Hur’s question outrageous, callous and unprofessional.
But NBC reports it was not Hur but Biden himself who raised Beau Biden’s death.
In the disastrous press conference, Biden went on the attack, asking, “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
NBC’s sources suggest this was a knowingly false claim by the president — he was the one who raised his son’s death.
If true, this isn’t something the White House can simply fix with a few rewrites in brackets.
The corrected version would read: “How in the hell dare [I] raise that? Frankly, when [I raised] the question I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
It would make referencing recent conversations with dead foreign leaders look like moments of clarity.
While we await the spin, the report indicates the president is either mentally diminished or openly deceptive in such moments.
The latter seems most likely.
Biden clearly went to the podium intending to make this attack on Hur.
That means his staff probably vetted it.
And that wasn’t the president’s only false claim at the presser.
He alleged the special counsel did not find willful retention of material.
Hur not only did so but repeatedly said so in the report. Biden claimed he did not show classified material to third parties.
Not only did Hur find he did, there’s a witness to that fact.
Biden said he kept material in locked drawers or drawers capable of being locked.
Hur showed pictures of ripped boxes holding such material in his garage.
Once again, it’s hard to see how Biden made these false claims without his staff’s prior review.
The president famously works off teleprompters and scripts.
His staff also did not correct the record on any of these false statements after the press conference, despite their being demonstrably untrue.
Ironically, the White House may have to claim the president was simply confused in a press conference called to deny such chronic confusion.
It already had to spin the president confusing the presidents of Egypt and Mexico in that presser.
But there is support for the diminished-capacity defense.
The president continues to make false statements about Beau, including repeated claims Beau died in the Iraq War.
He died at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., from glioblastoma, the most prevalent form of brain cancer, in May 2015 — six years after he returned from Iraq.
Of course, an enabling media quickly took the White House’s lead and lined up Democrats to lash out at Hur.
“I do think the special counsel’s gratuitous mention of Beau Biden, whatever you think of the rest, but to talk about someone’s dead son and to put that in,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) objected on CNN, “what is this country coming to that we’re politicizing that?”
The campaign used the first lady to raise money off the outrage: “I hope you can imagine how it felt to read that attack — not just as Joe’s wife, but as Beau’s mother,” she said in a fundraising appeal.“We should give everyone grace, and I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points.”
But NBC reports it was the president who dragged his son’s death into the interview.
Using the White House to spread false claims about these investigations is very dangerous.
It can be the thing impeachments are made off.
Ian Sams, the White House counsel spokesman, has been especially aggressive in attacking the president’s critics and spinning these reports.
Reporters have even confronted him about false claims about the Hur report.
White House staff carrying out a possible disinformation campaign can raise allegations of violations of the public trust and misuse of federal staff and resources.
Such accusations have been included in past articles of impeachment.
The coordinated campaigns can also bootstrap earlier alleged violations into the period of Biden’s presidency.
The House, for example, is pursuing allegations of corruption stemming from Biden’s time as vice president and the time in which he was a private citizen before running in 2016.
Using federal personnel like Sams to spread or repeat false claims could make such allegations “evergreen,” allowing the House to tie them to contemporary “in office” conduct.
In other words, the White House has to be careful that its effort to spin out of scandal doesn’t result in spinning into an impeachment.
Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.
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