First Lady Jill Biden wasn’t in the direct line of fire when Special Counsel Robert Hur dropped his shot-heard-round-the-world report this week — but she has now responded to the attack.
In what might have been the main story, Hur’s report, a year in the making and running more than 375 pages, failed to charge President Biden with any crimes for his treatment of classified documents.
Yet due to characterizations Hur made about his long interview with Biden, Hur’s report became more notable for calling into question Biden’s mental acuity, memory, and intellectual fitness as he portrayed Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man” with memory problems.
Biden quick-draw defenders, including former Attorney General Eric Holder, called Hur’s editorialized insinuations “gratuitous” and a politically motivated by the Trump appointee Hur, who stingingly wrote that Biden had such bad memory trouble that he couldn’t remember the year his late son Beau died.
[The President himself responded angrily to the report, which — it should be noted — he did not ask the DOJ to redact any part of — a gesture toward transparency that has come back to bite him.]
Now the First Lady — having heard from many supporters and no doubt also many Democratic political consultants — has responded at length to Hur’s attack on her husband.
NEW from @DrBiden: "I don’t know what this Special Counsel was trying to achieve. We should give everyone grace, and I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points." pic.twitter.com/CRBmHLhaAv
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) February 11, 2024
Like the President, Jill Biden was especially affronted by the personal nature of Hur’s attack and by his mention of Beau’s death, something the President called “none of [Hur’s] damn business.” The First Lady wrote “I don’t know what this Special Counsel was trying to achieve. We should give everyone grace, and I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points.”
Jill Biden implied that it would be unthinkable that her husband could forget anything about Beau’s death, a singular moment of grief in a life filled with loss, and one — the First Lady attests — that drives Biden’s sense of public service.
Talking about the central position of Beau’s death, and the grief it brought, Jill Biden writes: “May 30th is a day forever etched in our hearts. It shattered me, it shattered our family. So many of you know that feeling after you lose a loved one, where you feel like you can’t get off the floor. What helped me, and what helped Joe, was to find purpose. That’s what keeps Joe going, serving you and the country we love.”
The First Lady asserts that not only did her husband get “off the floor” after the loss, but that it has propelled him, saying that he’s “81, that’s true, but he’s 81 doing more in an hour than most people do in a day.”
His age, she says, and the “experience and expertise” it brings is an “asset.” It is a moment Democrats hope will resound like Ronald Reagan’s famous line, as the senior candidate in a presidential race, when he said:
“I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”