WASHINGTON — The White House launched a fierce pushback Friday against a brutal special counsel report portraying Joe Biden as elderly and forgetful, describing it as a political hit-job on the president in an election year.
Vice President Kamala Harris called the stinging report "politically motivated" while White House spokesman Ian Sams branded it "gratuitous and inappropriate" as they sought to call its impartiality into question.
Whatever it takes to return Trump back to 1600 Pennsylvania — even if it meant a civil war — would be "worth it," according to one religious leader.
"I've actually had people say that if Trump was to be elected if we got a conservative Congress, that they fear that we would have another civil war," Andrew Wommack, a TV evangelical preacher, said during an episode of his "Truth & Liberty" show earlier this week, and first reported by Newsweek. "And you know what? I don't want a civil war, I don't know anybody that does, but would it be worth it? To turn this nation back? I believe it would."
Wommack is president of the Truth & Liberty Coalition, described online as an organization that seeks to "educate, unify, and mobilize believers to impact culture and effect godly change on important social issues."
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As Nov. 5 creeps closer for the country to head to the polls and vote for the next president, the topic of another civil war appears to be growing.
"The Civil War has never really left American politics — it just seems to have exploded in this moment,” Tim Galsworthy, a historian at Bishop Grosseteste University told The Washington Post. “When the U.S. is divided, the Civil War becomes that great reference point, because it’s the ultimate moment of division.”
About 620,000 soldiers from both the Union and the Confederacy perished in the Civil War dating from 1861 to 1865.
Former President Donald Trump, the leader of the MAGA movement, has remained the frontrunner in the race to become the GOP nominee, with only former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley challenging him to attempt to cut President Joe Biden's time in the White House to one term.
Wommack's embrace of a bloody clash between Americans was prompted by a viewer dialing in and asking if there could be a "grace revolution that could get the U.S. to switch out the Constitution for the Bible."
The pastor said that the founders' document is fine as-is. It's those in positions of power that are asleep at the switch.
"There's nothing wrong with our Constitution, the problem is we're not following it," he said.
He then went on: "If they were still writing the Bible today, I believe that the American Constitution and the founding of this nation would be in scripture as one of the great things that God has done."
A 'MAGA civil war' is brewing in Montana where two far-right Republicans are battling for the right to fight for Democrat Jon Tester's Senate seat, reported The Independent on Friday.
Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) finally broke months of speculation this week by announcing a run for Senate run as former President Donald Trump threw his support behind former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy, according to a new Truth Social post and the report.
“This Republican primary race is the people of Montana versus Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden and the Washington insiders,” said Rosendale in his video announcing his candidacy. “Mitch McConnell knows that I won’t support him for Republican leader, so he’s trying to keep me out of the Senate.”
Rosendale already has the backing of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who previously led the charge to successfully remove Kevin McCarthy from the House speakership.
Elsewhere, however, there are signs that Trump allies are working to consolidate the party behind Sheehy. McCarthy's successor as House speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), reportedly planned to endorse Rosendale this week but backpedaled amid private criticism by Trump associates.
And Trump, who has personally despised Tester ever since he played a key role investigating a scandal that sunk Trump's nomination of Ronny Jackson to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, took to his Truth Social account to endorse Sheehy himself on Friday afternoon.
"I LOVE MONTANA!" wrote Trump. "Tim Sheehy is an American Hero and highly successful Businessman from the Great State of Montana. He is strongly supported by our incredible Chairman of the NRSC, Steve Daines, and many other patriotic Senators and Republicans who have endorsed our Campaign to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! I also respect Matt Rosendale, and was very happy to Endorse him in the past - and will Endorse him again in the future should he decide to change course and run for his Congressional Seat. But in this instance, Tim is the candidate who is currently best-positioned to DEFEAT Lazy Jon Tester, and Regain the Republican Majority in the United States Senate."
"Tim is a Political Outsider, Strong on the Border, the Military/Vets, and our constantly under siege Second Amendment. He will stand tall in the fight against the Radical Left Democrats, who are Destroying our Country," Trump continued. "Also, he is far more likely to Defeat Lazy Jon. America First Patriot Tim Sheehy has my Complete and Total Endorsement!"
Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur's new report may have exonerated President Joe Biden from any criminal wrongdoing over his handling of classified documents, but its characterization of Biden's mental fortitude has one legal expert questioning Hur's use of certain language.
Even though the nearly 400-page report concluded that Biden's actions didn't warrant any criminal charges, Hur — whom former President Donald Trump appointed as US Attorney for the District of Maryland in 2018 — still made several digs at Biden. The report mentioned his mental faculties nine times, and Hur referred to the president as a "sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory."
In a Friday panel discussion on CNN, Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel for ethics and government reform in former President Barack Obama's administration, said that he agreed Biden could have shown more care in how he handled documents pertaining to his time as vice president. However, he called Hur's remarks about the president's memory "gratuitous" and uncharacteristic of a prosecutor who is not charging the subject of an investigation.
READ MORE: Trump appointee overseeing Biden classified documents probe unlikely to recommend criminal charges
"I think there's a legitimate discussion to be had [about Biden's handling of documents]," Eisen said. "I was the Obama White House ethics czar, I was talking to the Bush-era ethics czar, and we were surprised that the special counsel veered in our view gratuitously into comments about the president's age and memory that are the most hot-button political issues right now. There's a long-standing DOJ principle that prosecutors should avoid that kind of thing when they don't charge."
The White House issued a terse response to Hur's report, with Biden's personal attorney Bob Bauer and White House special counsel Richard Sauber both demanding Hur revise his characterizations of Biden's memory "so that they are stated in a manner that is within the bounds of your expertise and remit."
"Not only do you treat the President differently from other witnesses when discussing his limited recall of certain years-ago events, but you also do so on occasions in prejudicial and inflammatory terms," Sauber and Bauer wrote. "It is one thing to observe President Biden's memory as being 'significantly limited' on certain subjects... it is quite another to use the more sweeping and highly prejudicial language included later in the report. This language is not supported by the facts, nor is it appropriately used by a federal prosecutor in this context."
The president's advanced age is a topic frequently explored by his critics, who point out that should Biden win reelection, he would be 86 years old by the time he left office in January of 2029. Of course, former President Donald Trump — who is assumed to win the GOP presidential nomination — isn't too far behind his rival. If Trump wins in November, he would be into his eighties by the time his second term ends.
Watch the video of Eisen's remarks below.
Thursday marked the release of special counsel Robert K. Hur's in-depth report on classified government documents found in President Joe Biden's home in Delaware.
Hur concluded that "no criminal charges are warranted," but his comments on Biden's age have infuriated the 81-year-old president and his supporters. The special counsel described Biden as a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
In scathing analysis published by the New York Times on Feb. 9, liberal economist Paul Krugman slams Hur's comments as ageist and "disgusting."
READ MORE:'Losing his marbles': Trump is getting a pass on his mental acuity
Krugman recalls, "As it happens, I had an hour-long off-the-record meeting with Biden in August. I can't talk about the content, but I can assure you that he's perfectly lucid, with a good grasp of events. And outside that personal experience, on several occasions when I thought he was making a serious misjudgment — like his handling of the debt ceiling crisis — he was right and I was wrong. And my God, consider his opponent."
The "opponent" Krugman is referring to is, of course, 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, now 77.
Krugman finds it laughable that Trump's supporters obsess over Biden's age when Trump confused former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley during a recent speech.
"When I listen to Donald Trump's speeches," the liberal Times columnist writes, "I find myself thinking about my father, who died in 2013…. During his last year, my father suffered from sundowning: He was lucid during the day, but would sometimes become incoherent and aggressive after dark. If we're going to be doing amateur psychological diagnoses of elderly politicians, shouldn't we be talking about a candidate who has confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and whose ranting and raving sometimes reminds me of my father on a bad evening?"
Krugman adds, "So to everyone who's piling on Biden right now, stop and look in the mirror. And ask yourself what you are doing."
Read Paul Krugman's full New York Times analysis at this link (subscription required).Joe Biden and Donald Trump face one of the longest presidential campaigns in US history, raising questions about the endurance of the oldest ever pair of nominees -- and of weary voters.
Concerns about whether two men born in the 1940s are ready for a lengthy duel in 2024 were thrust back in the spotlight when a bombshell special counsel report called Biden an "elderly man with a poor memory
Biden, 81, tried to fight back during an extraordinary televised speech from the White House, but ended up causing more alarm, as he called the Egyptian president the leader of Mexico.
The question now is whether the debacle could be a turning point for the US election or whether voters will simply buckle down for nine months of more of the same.
Usually at this stage, at least one of the parties is embroiled in a heated primary contest. Instead, Trump, 77, is all but locked in for the Republican nomination, while Biden, running as an incumbent, faces next-to-no opposition.
That sets the scene for a potentially even more bruising replay of their already savage 2020 clash. Not only the candidates will be the same but their main themes: Biden on Trump as a threat to US democracy and Trump mocking Biden as decrepit.
In some ways the campaign is exceptional. Trump is seeking to be the first defeated former president to come back for a second term since Grover Cleveland in 1892.
But while the rest of the world is closely -- and nervously -- watching, US voters are increasingly turned off by the choice on offer.
"They've seen them each for four years," said William Galston of the Brookings Institution.
A University of Massachusetts poll on February 5 showed 53 percent of people preferred Trump not to stand, and 57 percent said the same for Biden.
Speculation -- and for some, fantasies -- abounds about one or both of the two men pulling out, whether as a result of illness or in Trump's case, multiple criminal cases. However they both insist they are irreplaceable.
Thursday's devastating special counsel report and Biden's angry retort -- particularly in denying the claim that he could not remember when his son Beau died -- have supercharged those concerns.
Polls show voters aren't as worried about Trump's age, despite the tycoon being nearly as old and himself recently mixing up the leaders of Hungary and Turkey among other gaffes.
"Age is primarily an issue for Biden," said Robert Rowland, professor of political communication at the University of Kansas.
Biden needed to get out in the public eye to explain his policies but his staff were protecting him "because they know of his tendency to go off message," he told AFP.
"If he's running for president, he's got to satisfy the people that he has the cognitive skills and the strength, and the only way he does that is by being in unscripted settings where they can see him think and answer in real time."
A grueling campaign schedule could, paradoxically, see Trump and Biden spend less time on traditional media.
Biden is set to skip a traditional Super Bowl interview before America's biggest sporting event, while TV debates between the two candidates are still up in the air. Trump has avoided any debates with his Republican rivals.
If voters are as indifferent as polls suggest, the 2024 battle is likely to depend more than ever on which candidate can best mobilize supporters.
Biden has recently turned his focus to turnout, stepping up appeals to Democrats to vote. For Trump, the battle will be to expand from his ultra-loyal hard-right base to the waverers in the middle who may not like either man.
© Agence France-Presse
Top legal and political experts are taking a closer look at Special Counsel Robert Hur's final 388-page report on his extensive, 13-month investigation into President Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents from his time as Vice President, with several arriving at similar conclusions: it was, they say, a political or partisan "hit job."
Longtime former Obama senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer, who worked on the successful 2008 campaign, transition, and in the Obama White House, published an essay, "Thoughts on the Partisan Attack on Biden's Memory."
"The Special Counsel report is going to make Biden's age and competence centerstage for the foreseeable future," Pfeiffer warns, again stating, "this report is a partisan hit job."
"While the report concluded that Biden’s conduct was not worthy of being charged with a crime, the report is being treated as a disaster for the President," he observes, noting, "The press went into full feeding frenzy mode."
"Hur, who worked for Trump before being appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden, filled his report with attacks on Biden’s memory and mental faculties. In the report, Hur goes out of his way to paint a damning portrait of the President. He cites several examples of memory lapses and describes Biden as a 'well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.'"
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Pfeiffer declares Hur's report is "very bad and poses some real political peril for Biden."
He also notes, "It’s hard to read the report and not think that, without the ability to charge Biden with a crime, Hur wanted to damage him politically," but also says, "the Special Counsel made it very clear that there were real differences in how Biden and Trump dealt with classified information."
Pfeiffer points to this passage from Hur's report:
"It is not our role to assess the criminal charges pending against Mr. Trump, but several material distinctions between Mr. Trump's case and Mr. Biden's are clear. Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts. Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview, and in other ways cooperated with the investigation."
But Pfeiffer also offered additional pushback to Hur's claims, in a section titled: "If Biden’s Memory Were This Bad, We Would Know."
"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."
Obama Attorney General Eric Holder blasted Hur and his own former Dept. of Justice: "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."
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Professor of law, MSNBC legal contributor, and former U.S, Attorney Joyce Vance advises: "Move on. Robert Hur crossed a line. He doesn't need any more oxygen."
Meanwhile, other top experts also weighed in.
Political pollster and MSNBC/NBC News political analyst Cornell Belcher writes, "It wasn’t just a mere typical political hit job, it was a deeply personally offensive hit job that invoked his dead son."
Jim Messina, the Obama White House Deputy Chief of Staff who went on to run the successful Obama-Biden 2012 re-election campaign says, "We've got to stop treating a single line in a gratuitously long, heavily editorialized special counsel's report--in which no crime was found btw--by a partisan Republican investigator like it's a bigger liability than Trump's 91 criminal charges and being found liable for rape."
He also writes: "Let's be clear--the special counsel isn't a dummy and we should be very careful not to take the bait after Comey pulled this in 2016. Hur, a lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn't have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically."
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, an attorney and former Republican U.S. Congressman, responding to Messina, notes that Hur "couldn’t indict Biden legally so he tried to indict Biden politically."
And David Rothkopf, the popular foreign policy, national security, and political affairs analyst and commentator, responding to Scarborough adds: "This. Exactly right. He had no evidence so he offered snide little lies instead. He turned a DoJ report into the Burn Book from Mean Girls."
RELATED: ‘I Don’t Give a Darn’: Experts Blast ‘Political Swipe’ in Special Counsel’s Biden Report
Georgia Republicans are out to punish Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and the scheme has the backing of Donald Trump ally Lt. Gov. Burt Jones – who could himself face charges for his own conduct following the 2020 election.
Jones has been using his influence as president of the state Senate to allow separate legislative investigations into how Willis has handled a backlog of criminal cases and spent taxpayer funds on the Trump prosecution, which the lieutenant governor dismisses as a political "circus," reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“It has all the implications that she is prosecuting for profit,” Jones told the newspaper. “I know she’s out there wanting to be a self-promoter, but now it looks like she’s profiting off taxpayer dollars.”
Jones told the Journal-Constitution that the district attorney's personal relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade made her "fair game," but he insists he's not out for revenge.
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“I’m wondering if the resources are being used properly,” he said.
Burt signed off on a Senate investigated overcrowding at the Fulton County jail and is expected to tie Willis to recent deaths at the infamous facility, and the lieutenant governor recently endorsed a new Senate committee with subpoena authority to determine whether Willis misspent state money due to her relationship with Wade.
He also supports an effort by Gov. Brian Kemp to authorize a new state commission to punish or remove "rogue" prosecutors, and several of his Senate allies filed the first complaint under that law against Willis for allegedly using "cherry-picked cases" to advance her political career.
As a state senator, Jones was among 16 Republican activists who signed documents in December 2020 asserting they were duly elected presidential electors from Georgia, where multiple vote counts had shown Joe Biden had won against Trump, and he was sent a target letter in July 2022 with other GOP electors warning of possible charges.
Jones filed a motion not long afterward seeking to block Willis from bringing charges against him because she had hosted a fundraiser for Charlie Bailey, who had gone on to run against Jones as a Democrat, and a Fulton County judge disqualified Willis and her office from investigating him further.
The nonpartisan Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia was then placed in charge of the investigation of Jones, but it has not announced whether any charges would be brought against the lieutenant governor, who has spent $110,000 in campaign funds on legal fees.
Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," State Attorney for Palm Beach County Dave Aronberg dumped all over the special counsel Robert Hur for his report on President Joe Biden retaining government documents and questioned whether Hur is even aware he contradicted himself in his conclusions.
Speaking with hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the Florida prosecutor bluntly called the report "sloppy."
"Joe, when I thought that this was such a political gift to candidate Donald Trump that he may have to list it as an in-kind campaign contribution," he joked. "Robert Hur's appointment as special counsel is another example of [Attorney General] Merrick Garland's determination to appear apolitical. That's why he kept on a Republican Trump appointed U.S.. attorney in David Weiss to investigate Hunter Biden. That's why he appointed a Republican Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Robert Hur to investigate President Biden."
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'Merrick Garland didn't have to put all this extraneous stuff out there," Aronberg exclaimed. "How different is this than [Trump Attorney General] Bill Barr who refused to show the public the Mueller report and then issued that three-page memo that misled the public?"
"This investigation should have been relatively easy; there was full cooperation. The only reason they found out about the documents is Joe Biden told them about it — it's a sloppy report!' he exclaimed.
"Summary on page one says that there was willful retention and disclosure, but then on page 215 it says there's a shortage of evidence on these points: which is it?" he ranted. "The question to me is why did he do this? I think the reason is he was motivated to avoid David Weiss's fate. David Weiss is hated by his own party. I think that's why Robert Hur did this. It's Comey 2.0."
Watch below or at the link.
MSNBC 02 09 2024 09 09 55 youtu.be
CNN "This Morning" co-host Phil Mattingly was on the receiving end of a fierce dressing down from Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) after he tried to equate the finding in special counsel Robert Hur's on documents President Joe Biden had in his home with the boxes of material found in Mar-a-Lago that Donald Trump refused to return until the FBI showed up.
During his appearance on CNN, Mattingly pressed Goldman — who served as lead majority counsel in Trump's first impeachment trial — on Hur's controversial report about Biden's "willful retention" of documents which received immediate pushback.
Asked of the report, "You don't think that backed it up?' Goldman shot back, "No, no, first of all, the evidence that they gathered that he [Biden] knowingly and willfully retained classified information while he was a private citizen, which is necessary and the special counsel discusses that, is based on such thin evidence."
"When you're talking about notebooks versus actually marked classified documents, that's a significant difference, because President Biden as part of his job took copious notes, some of it must have been on classified information, some unclassified, and he understandably believed his notes were his, and they didn't have classified markings on them — that's a big difference," Goldman added.
"So what you really need to look at is what marked classified documents did he possess that he knew he possessed and maintained," he elaborated. "And the notion that his own credibility or recollection would have anything to do with the evidence which was plainly insufficient, is a fallacy. And not only that, but you're assuming that the defendant in this case would testify at trial." I was a prosecutor for ten years and I did not consider the defendant's credibility as a witness."
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After adding, "I may have considered the defendant's credibility in explaining the evidence and whether or not it would rise to the level of knowing intent," he continued, "So this was extremely gratuitous, unnecessary, and just a political potshot in the middle of an election year when the special counsel knows it's two elderly men who are running for president, and this one who was appointed by Donald Trump wanted to make sure he got his licks in."
Changing direction, host Mattingly brought up Biden's Mexico gaffe in a televised speech late Thursday band Goldman wasn't having it.
'"Yeah, it's also true that Speaker Mike Johnson [R-LA] went on 'Meet the Press' and confused Iran and Israel, which is a much more significant mistake than President Sisi as being in Mexico," Goldman scolded. "I'm not going to sit here saying Mike Johnson has no memory loss or that he's ill-equipped to be speaker of the House because he made an obvious incidental tangential mistake. It's wrong to think that because President Biden made a simple incidental mistake that everyone understood what he was referring to, that that has anything to do with his mental acuity. and especially when you're now trying to compare him to another elderly man who is charged with four indictments, who doesn't believe that the law applies to him, and makes all these mistakes."
Watch the video below or at this link.
CNN 02 09 2024 08 09 21 youtu.be
Attempting to explain what MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called "gratuitous" attacks on President Joe Biden in special counsel Robert Hur's report on government documents found in Biden's garage, legal analyst Ken Dilanian accused the Donald Trump-appointed former U.S. attorney of trying to placate Republicans.
After the clearly furious Scarborough mocked Hur as a fake "neurologist" with a degree from the fraudulent Trump University, Dilanian explained that the attack on Biden would give Hur something to use in his defense for not bringing charges against the sitting president when he is interrogated by angry Republicans.
Pointing to Hur stating Biden is a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," Dilanian began, "Joe, I understand where you're coming from and people feel that way, but let me give you the explanation I've heard from the Justice Department officials and insight into why that was in there, though it seems gratuitous."
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"If Hur is saying, 'I have evidence that Joe Biden willfully retained classified information, he didn't just find the information in 2022, as we thought, but he found them in 2017," he continued. "He's recorded saying that to his ghostwriter — why isn't he charging him? The explanation is Joe Biden said he didn't remember. He was recorded saying, 'I found classified documents in my house in Virginia" to the ghostwriter. He is recorded disclosing classified information to the ghostwriter, but he says he forgot that."
"Rob Hur felt there was a need to explain how it'd be in front of a jury," he elaborated. "He has to go to Congress and justify to angry Republicans why Donald Trump is being charged with retaining classified documents but Joe Biden isn't. That's the explanation a lot of people may not like, maybe people thought he went too far."
"Rob Hur is ultimately going to have to go to Congress and answer for this, but that's the explanation," he later added.
Watch the video below or at this link.
MSNBC 02 09 2024 06 03 07 youtu.be
An angry, emotional US President Joe Biden defended his mental competence Thursday in a rare evening address to Americans to respond to biting comments in a report released hours earlier on his mishandling of classified documents.
Appearing on live television from the White House, Biden was furious over the report's claim that he was unable to remember even the date of his son Beau's death in 2015, as well as other key moments in his life.
"My memory is fine," he said.
"There's even reference that I don't remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that?" Biden said, visibly fighting to rein in his emotions.
The report from special counsel Robert Hur should have been good news for Biden.
It cleared him of any criminal wrongdoing in his storing of the classified documents, which he'd used while vice president under Barack Obama, at his private home and a former office.
This stands in sharp contrast with a separate criminal investigation into Biden's likely November presidential rival Donald Trump, who is accused of taking vast quantities of top-secret documents after leaving the White House in 2021, then obstructing attempts to get them back.
However, Hur unleashed a political bombshell, just nine months from the election, by saying the 81-year-old Democrat came across as a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
Given Biden's reduced mental acuity, Hur said, a jury would not in any case have found him guilty on documents charges.
Asked about that comment by reporters in the White House after his formal remarks, Biden said: "I am well meaning, and I'm an elderly man, and I know what the hell I'm doing."
"I'm president and I put this country back on its feet," he said. "Take a look at what I've done since I've become president."
Speaker Mike Johnson and other top Republican leaders of the House of Representatives called Hur's report "deeply disturbing" and said it showed Biden was "unfit" for the presidency.
"A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office," they said in a statement.
- Issue hard to dispel -
Earlier Thursday, Biden had declared that his exoneration by Hur on any legal issues meant "this matter is now closed."
However, that clearly was not true -- as Biden's highly unusual, last-minute scheduling of televised remarks showed.
Biden has long been fighting attacks from the right and also some within his own party that he is too old to be president. As he gears up for the November election against Trump -- a man he says poses an existential threat to US democracy -- Biden is campaigning on his long experience and his stewardship of a fast-recovering, post-Covid economy.
"I'm the most qualified person in the United States to be president and finish the job," he said in the late-evening remarks.
But it will be hard to shake the impact of Hur's stinging comments.
Biden didn't help himself either by momentarily mixing up Mexico with Egypt while answering a reporter's question about Israel's war in Gaza.
- Not 'accurate' or 'appropriate' -
Hur was appointed by Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland, last year after classified material was found at the president's home in Delaware and in a former office.
The 388-page report said Biden had "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials" in the period after he left the vice presidency -- well before he defeated Trump in 2020 to become president.
Hur -- previously nominated by Trump to be the lead prosecutor for the state of Maryland -- said documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and other matters were recovered by FBI agents.
However, "We conclude the evidence is not sufficient to convict, and we decline to recommend prosecution of Mr Biden for his retention of the classified Afghanistan documents," Hur said.
Hur then said that "It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him -- by then a former president well into his eighties -- of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness."
White House special counsel Richard Sauber and Biden's personal lawyer Bob Bauer attacked the comments as neither "accurate or appropriate."
"The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events," they said in a letter to Hur. "Such comments have no place in a Department of Justice report."
The president noted that he had granted five hours of interviews to the special counsel on October 8 and 9, right as he was handling the start of the Israel-Hamas crisis.
U.S. senators cleared a first hurdle Thursday to a sweeping foreign aid package -- including a $60 billion lifeline for Ukraine -- although opposition from right-wing allies of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump means final passage remains far from guaranteed.
The procedural vote to at least consider the bill marked a stunning about-face by Senate Republicans.
Until now they had refused to renew funding for Ukraine's fight against Russian invasion if Democrats didn't also agree to stringent new curbs on a record surge of undocumented migrants across the US-Mexican border.
The $95 billion package set to be debated also includes funding for Israel's fight against Hamas militants and for key strategic ally Taiwan. The lion's share, however, would help pro-Western Ukraine restock depleted ammunition supplies, weapons and other crucial needs as it enters a third year of war.
The aid had looked dead in the water after Republicans rejected an earlier version on Wednesday that also featured many of the Mexico border security measures they had spent months championing.
Under pressure from Trump, who is running for a second term and wants to exploit President Joe Biden's perceived weakness on immigration, Republicans instead appeared to decide that they would prefer stopping any border reforms until after November's election.
But Republican senators relented in a dramatic vote Thursday after the Democrats, who have a slim majority in the upper chamber, decoupled the aid from the border issue entirely.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky posted on X, formerly Twitter, that the vote was a "very important first step" in freeing up more aid for his country and a "bad day" for Russia's President Vladimir Putin.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, vowed to keep the chamber working on the bill "until the job is done."
"This bill is essential for our national security, for the security of our friends in Ukraine, in Israel, for humanitarian aid for innocent civilians in Gaza, and for Taiwan," he said.
The procedural move, which could open the way for a full vote in the middle of next week after amendments to the text are negotiated, capped an extraordinary spate of chaos in a deeply polarized Congress.
The two parties are able to agree on little ahead of the elections. However, much of the dysfunction has been blamed directly on Trump, who looks almost certain to be the Republican standard-bearer in November despite losing the presidency to Biden in 2020 and being embroiled in criminal charges.
- 'Real solutions' -
Senate Republicans originally demanded border security as a condition for supporting pro-Western Ukraine as it battles the invasion launched by Putin in February 2022.
But Trump is running for a return to the White House on a platform centered around accusing Biden of failing to resolve the border issue.
A hard-fought bipartisan compromise -- combining Ukraine and Israel aid with some of the toughest immigration curbs in decades -- was initially celebrated as a breakthrough on some of the most consequential issues facing the country.
However, the plan collapsed within days of its weekend release, as Trump warned lawmakers to reject it.
The new foreign-aid-only bill could still fail, with Senate Republicans divided between traditional conservatives and Trump's allies, who are against any action on the border before November's election and also oppose Ukraine aid.
Even if the foreign aid advances from the Senate, it would still have to pass through the much more Trump-friendly House of Representatives.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has not revealed whether he would be willing even to put a foreign aid-only bill on the floor for a vote.
And heated negotiations are taking place with House Republicans seeking to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who has become the main target for right-wing attacks over the border crisis.
"Instead of focusing on real solutions to secure the border... House Republicans have spent this week backtracking on their words and undermining their own professed priorities in order to do the bidding of Donald Trump," said Democratic National Committee rapid response director Alex Floyd.
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