Audio of special counsel interview adds to renewed debate of Biden’s fitness as president

Washington: A 2023 audio recording of President Joe Biden speaking haltingly and having memory lapses is the latest in a series of recent disclosures that have reopened a debate over Biden’s physical and mental fitness while in office and prompted fresh recriminations among Democrats.

The recording, released by the news outlet Axios on Friday night, documents a four-minute portion of Biden’s interview with Robert K. Hur, a special counsel who investigated his handling of classified information.

Hur had concluded early last year that “no criminal charges” were warranted in the case. But in clearing the president, Hur portrayed Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” based off an hourslong interview with the president, inflaming concerns that Biden’s fitness for office had significantly declined.

The audio clip did not reveal new exchanges between Hur and Biden. But it gives a fuller picture of why Hur described Biden as he did, capturing the president’s whispery voice and the long pauses in his speech. Trump administration officials have decided to release the fuller audio, according to two people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the decision, which has yet to be announced.

The audio clip comes as a forthcoming book — written by Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios — has provided new details on Biden’s mental and physical decline and chronicled how Biden’s advisers stamped out discussion of his age-related limitations. Among other issues, the book recounts Biden forgetting the names of longtime aides and allies, and outsiders who had not seen the president in some time being shocked at his appearance.

Top Democrats who closed ranks to defend Biden in his moment of crisis and vouched for his fitness for office have now had to rationalise those statements. In an interview on the “Talk Easy With Sam Fragoso” podcast last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — who had urged Biden to remain in the race to the end — visibly struggled not to laugh when the host asked if the president had at the time been “as sharp as you.”

“I said I had not seen decline,” Warren said, adding that Biden “was sharp, he was on his feet.”

“Senator, ‘on his feet’ is not praise,” Fragoso said as Warren smiled and chuckled. “‘He can speak in sentences’ is not praise.”

Warren replied: “OK, fair enough. Fair enough.”

The new debate recalls one of the Democratic Party’s most painful periods, when Biden and his allies struggled to right his reelection campaign amid calls by Democratic officials — both in private and in public — to drop out and name a successor.

Those calls erupted after a disastrous debate performance against former President Donald Trump that doomed Biden’s campaign. The president ultimately cleared the way for his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, to take his place at the top of the ticket.

The Biden administration had already released a lightly redacted transcript of the interview, but not the audio, asserting executive privilege. A spokesperson for Biden said the recording did nothing but confirm what was already public.

In the clip of the October 2023 interview with Hur, Biden speaks softly and haltingly as he struggles to recall key dates — such as the death of his son, Beau, from cancer in May 2015. Hur did not ask specifically about Beau, but Biden told the special counsel that “in 2017, 2018, that area,” Beau, who had served in the Delaware National Guard and had deployed to Iraq in 2008, had “either been deployed or dying.” Minutes later, the president said that “in 2017, Beau had died.”

The death of Biden’s son was one of the most emotional moments in Biden’s life, and Hur’s assessment that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” infuriated the president.

“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden said in a news conference hours after the report was made public, adding, “Frankly, when I was asked the question I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”

In one particularly meandering exchange, Biden took the better part of a minute — interspersed with several seconds-long pauses — to say that “Beau had passed and — this is personal — the genesis of the book and the title ‘Promise Me Dad’ was a — I know you’re all close with your sons and daughters, but Beau was like my right arm and Hunt was my left,” referring to his son Hunter.

Concerns about Biden’s lapses persisted through the end of Biden’s 2024 campaign, growing with each public fumble at a rally or news conference. Even during the news conference denouncing the special prosecutor’s assessment of his memory, Biden spoke of “the president of Mexico, el-Sissi,” confusing the presidents of Mexico and Egypt in response to a question about negotiations to release hostages held by Hamas.