WASHINGTON — Democrats on Friday defended President Joe Biden and slammed special counsel Robert Hur’s report as a Republican prosecutor with a political agenda.
Hur declined to file charges against Biden over his handling of classified information but then suggested the President suffers from memory loss, calling Biden “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory“.
Vice President Kamala Harris defended Biden at a gun violence prevention event in Washington, calling the report “inaccurate and inappropriate.”
“The way that the President’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts,” she said, adding, “And clearly politically motivated, gratuitous.”
Congressional Democrats also came to Biden’s defense with Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) saying the report was meant to damage the President with ‘cheap shots’.
“That’s 350 pages to just say that Joe Biden isn’t going to be indicted here, too. It was just a smear and cheap shots and just taking things out of context, or even just inventing,” Fetterman said.
“You don’t need 350 pages to say that … so clearly there was an agenda there,” Fetterman added.
Hur was appointed by former President Donald Trump in 2017 to serve as a U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland. Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House Counsel’s office, told reporters at the White House on Friday he believes Hur may also have taken shots at Biden to make up for not indicting him.
“When you are the first special counsel in history, not to indict anybody, there is pressure to criticize and to make, you know, statements that maybe in otherwise you wouldn’t make,” Sams said.
Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.) old ABC News on Thursday, “What everyone will soon realize is that this is a Republican special counsel who completely went out of his way to editorialize, to include material in his report that is unnecessary and irrelevant to what he was tasked with doing.”
