A transcript of President Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, released to lawmakers prior to Hur’s testimony and obtained by ABC News, contradicts the president’s characterization of an exchange about the death of his son, Beau Biden, from brain cancer.
“There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” a visibly irate Biden told reporters hours after special counsel Robert Hur’s report was made public last month. “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself: It wasn’t any of their damn business.”
But according to an ABC News review of the transcript, it was Biden, not Hur, who first invoked his son’s death — and the president indeed struggled to recall the exact year it occurred.
“And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t at this point … I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again,” Biden said during a line of questioning about his activities after leaving the vice presidency in 2017. “But if I ran again, I’d be running for president,” he said, per the transcript. “And, and so what was happening though — what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th–“
After two others present reminded him that Beau passed away in 2015, Biden said: “Was it 2015 he had died?”
“It was May of 2015,” another person said, according to the transcript.
The incident is cited by Hur, who characterized Biden in his 388-page report as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — a description that Biden and his legal team sharply criticized in the aftermath of the report’s publication.
While the transcript showed moments of memory lapses on Biden’s part, his testimony also included detailed descriptions of events that happened many years prior, including policy debates and his own foreign travel.
-ABC News’ Mary Bruce and Benjamin Siegel