The press spun, obfuscated and outright dismissed Special Counsel Robert Hur’s early 2024 report that stated then-President Joe Biden came off as an elderly man with memory issues well before his declining state emerged as an acceptable topic in the legacy media.
Hur, who was appointed by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents, famously concluded he would not bring charges against the then-president, in part because a jury would find him to be a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
A new book detailing the former president’s mental acuity concerns while in office, his prostate cancer diagnosis and the recently-released audio recordings of Biden’s interview with Hur reinvigorated the notion that mental acuity concerns were valid.
But when the Hur report was initially released in February 2024, months prior to Biden’s disastrous presidential debate performance, it made his cognitive decline impossible for the press to ignore, and much of the media rushed to Biden’s defense.
Hur acknowledged the documents were “willfully” obtained by Biden both as vice president and as a senator, but revealed Biden had a “hazy” memory of when he was previously in office and when his son Beau died.
Liberal pundits were often in lockstep to insist the report featured “gratuitous” language or was “editorialized,” and Biden attacked reporters who dared to question if he was fit for the job at a last-minute White House press conference following the release of the damning report.
Some reporters in the room vexed Biden by asking about his memory and concerns about his age, but left-leaning pundits were in damage-control mode.
Jim Acosta, at the time an anchor for CNN, wondered aloud if Hur’s assessment was “out of bounds,” while CNN commentator Paul Begala peddled claims from Biden officials saying the president was “totally focused” and “very sharp.”
Jeffrey Toobin appeared on CNN to scold Hur for making “unnecessary points” about Biden’s advanced age.
“Part of that report was an outrage, it was a disgrace. I mean, the idea that they that he would make such a big point of Biden being elderly is not something a prosecutor needed to do,” Toobin said.
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A panel of MSNBC hosts defended Biden by attacking Hur for injecting “ageism” into his report.
“Do you want to get into the age thing? Let’s call it what it is. This is ageism snuck into a report clearing the person of any wrongdoing,” MSNBC host Ari Melber told viewers during the network’s primetime coverage of the breaking news.
“If you want to get the ageism, young people are told all the time by their lawyers, ‘Hey, you’re way better off leaning into I don’t recall than possibly misstating something to a federal officer or under oath in this case.’ So it’s a lot of derogatory stuff,” Melber continued. “And I do think, and I want to be clear, a credit to the president that he chose to do fast cooperation. I think that’s good for the system. Politically, though, it’s now being used against him.”
His MSNBC colleague Chris Hayes insisted Hur was “frustrated and angry” that he “didn’t get more” from his probe into Biden, turning to how age is the “central narrative question here that this all revolves around.”
“Age is not something you can rebut,” Hayes said. “The man is 80 years old… He is the age he is, And so it’s a very useful political attack for them.”
“He rides a bike!” host Rachel Maddow interjected.
MSNBC host Katie Phang slammed the “inflammatory, unnecessary and partisan” language used in the report, while network contributor Molly Jong-Fast suggested Hur wasn’t a “good faith actor.”
“He’s not a neurologist,” Jong-Fast said.
Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer complained at the time that the Hur report was a “partisan hit job.” CNN’s media reporter at the time, Oliver Darcy, insisted that Hur’s depiction of Biden’s mental state “didn’t match reality.”
The New York Times went with the “Republicans pounce” framing when covering Biden’s reported memory issues and ex-MSNBC host Keith Olbermann raged that Hur “should be fired immediately” for offering an “amateur medical opinion.”
The media lined up high-profile Democrats to defend Biden, too.
Then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to bash the report as “gratuitous, unnecessary and inaccurate personal remarks.”
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MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, a former Biden press secretary, invited then-Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., onto her program to say Hur would be “disciplined or fired” if he were a typical prosecutor.
“What he did was quite deliberate and destructive and also just plain false,” Schiff said as Psaki nodded along.
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., said on CNN, “It was extremely gratuitous, unnecessary and just a political potshot.”
Journalist Drew Holden posted a lengthy social media thread last week detailing other examples of the media attacking Hur’s report, including then-NBC News host Chuck Todd telling viewers it played into the “right-wing noise machine” and USA Today rounding up “sympathetic voices” to dismiss the findings.
Holden also put a spotlight on The Washington Post, citing experts who insisted memory losses “are surprisingly normal” and a New York Times report that said Biden appeared “clearheaded” aside from fumbling a few dates.
Many longtime Biden allies have since come around after audio obtained by Axios contained clips from several interviews between Biden and Hur related to the probe.
On CNN, host Abby Phillip suggested Hur “undersold” the extent of Biden’s decline and threw the former president and the Democratic Party “a lifeline.”
“In a way, Robert Hur kind of undersold this,” Phillip said. “He kind of threw Joe Biden a lifeline. It was an opportunity, actually, for Democrats to take it seriously, maybe change gears at that point, maybe give a potential nominee more time.”
Former Obama spokesperson and political commentator Tommy Vietor wrote last week that critics of Hur’s report “weren’t totally fair.”
“[T]he book made me realize how important that context was for Hur in explaining his decision NOT to charge Biden, and I now feel that many of the attacks on Hur, including by me, weren’t totally fair,” Vietor wrote.
He added that he still believed the situation around Biden’s memory was “complicated” but that “clearly Biden was experiencing cognitive decline.”
“The just-released audio clearly shows a guy who should not be running for reelection,” Vietor wrote.
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Fox News Digital’s Lindsay Kornick and Hanna Panreck contributed to this report.
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