President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is looking to remind the American people that sometimes people “forget shit” after a special counsel report continuously made references to the president’s failing memory, one staffer told Politico Playbook.
Special counsel Robert Hur released a report into Biden’s handling of classified documents Thursday though he chose not to pursue any criminal charges. During an interview with the counsel, Biden forgot when his vice presidency began and ended as well as the time when his late son, Beau Biden, died, the report showed. Following the report, one Biden campaign official told Politico Playbook that the president’s age is not going to disappear from the campaign trail.
“The fact that he’s a senior citizen is not going to go away,” a Biden campaign official told Playbook. “What I’ve said to my colleagues is that we all have to remind the American people that sometimes we forget shit.”
U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House on February 8, 2024 in Washington, DC. Biden addressed the Special Counsel’s report on his handling of classified material, and the status of the war in Gaza. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
The special counsel report made numerous notes about Biden’s seemingly failing memory, adding that if the president were to appear before a jury, he would present himself as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The president appeared at an unexpected and rare press conference Thursday following the release of the report to defend his mental capacity. During the press conference, however, Biden committed several slip-ups, mixing up two foreign presidents and forgetting the name of a parish.
While recalling a discussion he had with the President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Biden referred to as him the “president of Mexico.”
After a special counsel found Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” and called him an “elderly man with a poor memory,” Biden held a brief — but angry and incoherent — press conference.
It did not go well, so we’re sharing it in its entirety: pic.twitter.com/ncstumQj13
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 9, 2024
Recently, the president referred to dead world leaders during several campaign stops. Biden seemed to mistakenly confuse French President Emmanuel Macron with the late former President François Mitterrand, who died from prostate cancer in 1996, during a campaign event Sunday. Biden then made a similar mistake at another campaign event Wednesday. The president said that he had spoken to the late German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, during a Group of Seven summit in 2021.
After being asked about the numerous gaffes, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre took a page out of the Biden reelection campaign playbook, reading a prepared list of the times various Republicans misspoke to demonstrate how common such slip-ups are.
KJP just read from a prepared list of instances where Republicans have confused people’s names or mixed up individuals to argue that Joe Biden is fully mentally fit.
She herself tripped over her words while doing this exercise. pic.twitter.com/1tVKyUyca1
— Dylan Housman (@Dylan_Housman) February 8, 2024
“But also Sean Hannity himself said Jason Chavez when he meant Matt Gaetz. I mean it happens. It really happens. Rick Scott even confuses saving Medicare money with cutting Medicaid — Medicare, pardon me. And so this happens. It happens to all of us and it is common,” Jean-Pierre said, adding that Speaker Mike Johnson has said Iran when referring to Israel.
“But I do want to make sure we don’t forget what the overall arching theme, what he is trying to say about our leadership on the global stage,” the press secretary continued.