US Vice President Kamala Harris, trusted lieutenant and running mate of President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential elections, is using her outreach and clout with African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Indians in tandem with the White House working overtime in damage control exercise to discredit a special counsel\u2019s claims that Biden suffers from memory loss.<\/p>\n
She and the White House have dismissed the Trump-appointed special counsel Robert Hur\u2019s report on classified documents, that Hur charged Biden took home when he was vice president under then-President Barack Obama, as inaccurate, out of bounds and politically motivated.<\/p>\n
President Biden reacted emotionally to the charges of his son\u2019s death, telling Hur that he damned well knew well and was shattered by his son\u2019s death and he (Hur) should have stayed out of it. Hur\u2019s uncharacteristic remarks about Biden\u2019s memory loss touched a raw nerve in the president.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a former prosecutor, the comments that were made by that prosecutor: gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate,\u201d said Vice President Kamala Harris, who previously served as California\u2019s attorney general. \u201cThe way that the president\u2019s demeanour in that report was characterised could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated,\u201d said Harris, addressing the report after speaking at a White House event on gun violence prevention.<\/p>\n
She is now the roving ambassador of President Biden campaigning in key swing states on how the democrats will keep abortion rights on the statute books as laid out in the Roe vs Wade case, sought to be demolished by the Republicans in the Congress. Along with the Presidential elections in 2024, the house of representatives also goes to polls to elect new law makers \u2013 the trend is against the republicans on the abortions issue but the classified documents case and border issue could spiral out of control if not contained, analysts say.<\/p>\n
The GOP lost three states on the abortion issue in the off year elections in 2023 and mid term elections in 2022. While the term of office for a senator is six years, that of a house representative of the congress is only two years. Putting damage control measures to contain the bombshell special counsel report that elevated concerns about Biden\u2019s age and mental fitness, White House counsel spokesman Ian Sams sought to reject the findings at a briefing with reporters.<\/p>\n
Sams pointed to \u201ca pressurised political environment\u201d in which he said Republicans have \u201cmade up claims of a two-tiered system of justice between Republicans and Democrats.\u201d \u201cWhen the inevitable conclusion is that the facts and the evidence don\u2019t support any charges, you\u2019re left to wonder why this report spends time making gratuitous and inappropriate criticisms of the president,\u201d Sams said.<\/p>\n
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur as special counsel to lead the investigation into Biden\u2019s classified documents ,and Robert Hur is a Republican and former Trump appointee as is the US attorney in Maryland. Hur\u2019s report, released Thursday, recommended no charges against Biden over classified documents found at the President\u2019s Delaware residence but cited evidence that Biden \u201cwilfully retained\u201d classified materials.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, Hur concluded that jurors would likely find reasonable doubt. The material difference between Trumps classified documents case and Biden\u2019s is that the former declined to hand over the documents to the National Archives but Biden admitted he took it and handed it over to the National Archives following protocols of the executive office, media reports said.<\/p>\n
The report portrayed Biden as an elderly man with \u201cdiminished capacities,\u201d including memory loss, claiming Biden could not recall which years he served as vice president or when his son, Beau Biden, had died of brain cancer. The remark that Biden could not remember when his son died, hit the President very hard emotionally and he reacted angrily saying he knew well and there was no memory loss and Hur had no idea of how he was and that national security matters had distracted him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you are the first special counsel in history not to indict anybody there is pressure to criticise and to make statements that maybe otherwise you wouldn\u2019t make,\u201d Sams said. Republicans seized on the report\u2019s claims. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who is challenging former president Donald Trump for the GOP nomination, wrote on social media that \u201cthe White House is not a taxpayer-subsidized nursing home,\u201d USA TODAY quoted her as saying.<\/p>\n
Biden, who turned 81 in November, attacked Hur\u2019s characterisations Thursday night at a hastily arranged press conference, insisting \u201cmy memory is fine\u201d and angrily rejecting the assertion that he could not remember when his son died. Biden also disputed the special counsel\u2019s conclusion that Biden \u201cwillfully retained\u201d the classified documents. Disputing the claims of Biden\u2019s memory loss, Sams said the report contradicts itself.<\/p>\n
He cited page 233, which says that if a case against Biden where to go to trial \u201cwe expect the evidence of Mr. Biden\u2019s state of mind to be compelling \u2013 clear, forceful testimony that he did, in fact, believe he was allowed\u201d to have notebooks that contained classified documents. \u201cI can\u2019t explain why the report veers all over the place on this issue,\u201d Sams said.<\/p>\n
The White House received the full 383-page special counsel report on Thursday, according to Sams, after Biden was briefed by his attorneys following a review by his lawyers. The White House stressed that Biden fully cooperated with the special counsel and pointed to legal experts and former prosecutors who criticised Hur\u2019s decision to include observations about Biden\u2019s memory in the report.<\/p>\n
Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who served in the Obama administration, called those passages \u201cflatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions.\u201d \u201cHad this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised,\u201d Holder wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. Biden\u2019s interview with prosecutors occurred the day after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel \u2013 while \u201cthe president was managing an intensive international crisis,\u201d Sams said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US Vice President Kamala Harris, trusted lieutenant and running mate of President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential elections, is\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":30768,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[7989,9892,9840,9894,299,168,479,9893,298,3530],"class_list":["post-30767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-attorney-general-merrick-garland","tag-case","tag-classified-documents","tag-damage-control","tag-democrats","tag-donald-trump","tag-kamala-harris","tag-memory-loss","tag-republicans","tag-us-2024-presidential-elections"],"reading_time":"5 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}