Panic, fury and blame: inside the White House after report targets Joe Biden’s age
White House staff are yet to contain the fallout after a special counsel faulted the 81-year-old president’s memory.
President Joe Biden’s age has long been a private worry for many fellow Democrats and a drag on his polling numbers. This week those anxieties came spilling out into the public.
The trigger was special counsel Robert Hur’s 345-page report on Mr Biden’s retention of classified documents, which contained a series of damaging passages about the US president’s recollections and “faulty memory” during interviews with investigators last northern autumn.
The fear for the White House and Mr Biden’s re-election campaign is that the document will reinforce doubts among large groups of voters about the 81-year-old president’s abilities as he seeks a second term against likely Republican nominee former president Donald Trump.
Democrats reacted with a mix of frustration and anger to Mr Hur’s report, which said Mr Biden portrayed himself as an “elderly man with a poor memory”.
Behind the scenes, Mr Biden himself has been furious. At a House of Representatives Democratic retreat on Thursday, the president unloaded to a small group of lawmakers, questioning the accuracy of the report by asking, “You think I would f — ing forget the day my son died?” according to people familiar with his private comments.
Not all the fire was directed outward: one former Biden aide blamed members of the president’s team for allowing the president to be interviewed by the special counsel in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks in Israel, an episode that led Mr Biden to spend hours in meetings with national security advisers in the Situation Room.
“How can they staff him so poorly and put him in that situation – on that day?” asked the former adviser.
At the White House, officials were apoplectic as they raced to contain the fallout from the characterisation of Mr Biden’s memory by Mr Hur, whom Mr Trump appointed to be US attorney (prosecutor) in Maryland during his presidency and whom Attorney-General Merrick Garland tapped to oversee the Biden document case.
Vice-President Kamala Harris weighed in Friday, saying the report “could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated”.
“We just reject that this is true, and I think that it does raise questions about the gratuitousness,” said Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office who briefed reporters.
Some Democrats inside and outside of Mr Biden’s bubble were privately anxious about what’s next for the campaign. The report came during a week when Mr Biden made a number of high-profile flubs, confusing current and past world leaders.
He didn’t help matters when he referred to the Egyptian president as the president of Mexico in his remarks on the counsel’s report Thursday night, and his decision to forgo a high-profile interview ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl has also drawn scrutiny.
“Anytime his age and capacity is front and centre is bad for his re-election prospects. That said, it does provide an opportunity to more forcefully deal with this issue which they have to do,” said Brian Goldsmith, a Biden donor and a Democratic consultant based in Los Angeles.
“The right response is that Biden is a better president because of his age and wisdom and experience, not despite his age and wisdom and experience.”
“They need to find a way to jujitsu this and turn it from a negative into a positive because it is not going away,” Goldsmith said. He added: “Avoiding the Super Bowl interview is a mistake.”
Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips, who is mounting a long-shot Democratic primary challenge to Mr Biden focused on the incumbent’s age, said on Friday he had “heard from a number of fellow Democrats who are awakening from the delusion being propagated by people with neither the president’s nor our nation’s best interests in mind”.
Despite his worrisome polls and concerns about his age, Mr Biden isn’t considering dropping his re-election bid, according to people familiar with his thinking. First lady Jill Biden, a key voice behind the scenes, has been a strong supporter of his decision to run for another term.
For now, the campaign and the White House aren’t signalling a new strategy. They plan to continue looking for ways to contrast with the 77-year-old Mr Trump, who faces multiple criminal indictments – including for his handling of classified documents.
Mr Trump has made his own high-profile flubs like recently referring to GOP rival Nikki Haley instead of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi as he spoke about the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by a mob of his supporters trying to stop the certification of his 2020 loss.
Mr Trump and his fellow Republicans have reacted to Mr Hur’s report by saying both that it shows Mr Biden is unfit for office and that the president is benefiting from a double-standard because he wasn’t charged. But Mr Hur in his report cited several material distinctions between the Trump and Biden cases.
Biden aides are also trying to keep the president active on the campaign trail, often with smaller events or interviews with non-traditional media like podcast hosts.
Mr Biden, for example, was scheduled to meet Jordan’s King Abdullah II at the White House on Monday and hold events during the week. But there were no calls internally for a course correction.
“We don’t feel like we had some tectonic shift here. The matter is closed,” said a White House official. “He is going to keep doing what he is doing. There is not going to be some major strategy shift here.”
Since the start of 2024, Mr Biden has picked up the pace of his campaign travel, hitting battleground states and the West Coast for fundraisers. He was in New York City this week raising money.
Some accommodations for his age are visible. He favours lightweight rubber-soled Cole Haan dress shoes or black sneakers. He often boards Air Force One through a shorter set of stairs, after several tripping incidents on the steeper steps. And his appearances at fundraisers are often carefully scripted, with Mr Biden standing on a podium reading from a teleprompter.
A Democrat close to the White House acknowledged that the line in the report about Mr Biden as an elderly man with a poor memory was “a brutal quote”. But this person described meeting Mr Biden dozens of times over the past four years and said while Mr Biden looks and sounds old and tends to repeat stories, “I have not noticed any sort of decline.”
White House counsellor Steve Ricchetti said he knows “the pace and the hours and the level of activity that occurs everyday. I’m sitting with him – he’s outworking all of us.”
After the report came out, Mr Biden rushed to address reporters at a hastily organised White House press conference on Thursday night.
He flashed anger when he recounted that the special counsel claimed that he had forgotten when his late son, Beau Biden, had died in 2015. “How in the hell dare he raise that,” said Mr Biden, who noted that he had worn his late son’s rosary beads around his left wrist “since the day he died”.
Democrats said the enraged Mr Biden was eager to address reporters directly about the report. There was some discussion about timing – like whether to do it on Thursday or Friday – but he had also told reporters earlier in the week that he would take questions on Thursday and the decision was made to go ahead. Many on his team said the press conference allowed him to push back forcefully, though the gathering arguably drew even more attention to the age issue than the report already had.
Democrats also expressed exasperation that Mr Hur had taken license to describe Mr Biden’s memory issues during his interactions with investigators last autumn. “OMG, I got PTSD about [former FBI director] James Comey all over again,” read one message in a text-chain among former aides to Hillary Clinton, said one person who was on the chain.
On Capitol Hill, some Democrats lashed out at the portrayal of Mr Biden, countering that the president’s record was far superior to that of Mr Trump’s and slammed the special counsel’s characterisation of Mr Biden as suffering from memory lapses.
“What a low blow – even referencing the death of his son,” said Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. “It’s gross.”
Siobhan Hughes contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal
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