The New York Times editorial board said President Biden must “do better” to address age concerns in an opinion piece in the wake of the release of a special counsel report that noted the president had problems with memory and recall.
The piece pointed to the president’s fiery press conference Thursday in which he hit back against the report, saying that his memory is “fine.” The Times’ editorial board said that Biden’s attempt at “assurances” about his memory during the press conference “didn’t work.”
“He must do better — the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump, who has a very real chance of retaking the White House,” the Times’ editorial board said in their piece.
The report from special counsel Robert Hur, released Thursday, concluded no charges should be brought against Biden, but highlighted memory problems faced by the president.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote.
“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
In Biden’s press conference Thursday, he specifically pushed back against Hur’s comments about how he could be perceived by a jury.
“I’m well-meaning and I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been president; I put this country back on its feet. I don’t need his recommendation,” Biden said.