President Joe Biden was visibly angry when discussing the death of his son, Beau, at his disastrous press conference last week following the Justice Department’s report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
At the briefing, an outraged Biden berated Special Counsel Robert Hur for not just referencing the issue in the report, but questioning Biden about it at all, and sharing that the president “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
“There’s even a reference [in the report] that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that,” Biden told reporters. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
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“I don’t need anyone — I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away or if he passed away.”
Yet at the time, Biden was either lying, which he has a long history of, or was simply offering another example of himself being an “elderly man with a poor memory,” as Hur described him.
According to the New York Post on Wednesday, it was Biden himself who dared to raise the issue of Beau Biden dying from brain cancer in 2015.
“It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden’s death,” according to two sources with knowledge of Biden’s responses to Hur during the five-hour interview last October. The sources first shared the information with NBC News.
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“Biden raised his son’s death after being asked about his workflow at a Virginia rental home from 2016 to 2018, the sources said, when a ghostwriter was helping him write a memoir about losing Beau to brain cancer in 2015,” NBC reported.
NBC News updated its own report on Wednesday night.
The outlet noted that during the interview, “Biden began trying to recall that period by discussing what else was happening in his life, and it was at that point in the interview that he appeared confused about when Beau died, the sources said. Biden got the date — May 30 — correct, but not the year.”
“These sources did not dispute that it was Biden, not Hur, who first mentioned a date for Beau’s death. But they said Biden felt betrayed by the comments in Hur’s report about his memory and mental state.”
NBC News added, “Associates of Hur say that Biden’s claim that the special counsel quizzed the president, unprompted, about his son’s death from cancer is an effort to take the focus off the special counsel’s findings regarding how Biden handled classified documents and his struggle to recall certain facts.”
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Biden’s action during the interview is on brand for the Democratic president.
As the Tampa Free Press has reported, Biden often brings up Beau’s death in what could be viewed on one hand as an effort to be empathetic, but on the other comes across as manipulative and designed to score political points.
He did so earlier this month during a phone call with the family of a U.S. soldier from Georgia who was slain in a terrorist attack in Jordan.
Biden also did so last year during a speech at a North Carolina community college and while talking to U.S. Marines stationed in Japan, and in 2022 at the dedication of a federal monument in Colorado.
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