"My Memory Is Fine": Joe Biden Hits Back At Report Alleging Memory Lapses (image@JoeBiden)

US President Joe Biden angrily criticised an investigation which said he mishandled top secret files and struggled to recall key life events. Biden insisted to media that “My memory is fine”. Department of Justice Special Counsel Robert Hur determined that Biden had improperly kept classified documents to military and foreign policy in Afghanistan after serving as vice-president.

The 345-page report said that the President’s memory had “significant limitations”. As party of the inquiry, Hur interviewed Biden for five hours. He said, the 81-year-old American President could not recall when he was vice-president – from 2009 to 2017 – or “even within several years, when his son Beau died”. Biden son Beau Biden died in 2015.

Biden slammed the claim and said, “how the hell dare he raise that?”. He said he don’t need “anyone to remind me when he died”.

He said he was “very occupied…in the middle of handling an international crisis”, when he was interviewed by the special counsel from October 8 to October 9 last year, when the Israel-Hamas war started.

The inquiry said that Biden had shared some of the sensitive material from hand-written notebooks with a ghostwriter for his memoir. Biden rejected the claim.

The special counsel concluded that it would be difficult to convict Biden of improper handling of files because “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”.

Joe Biden responded to this by saying that he is elderly and know “what the hell” he is doing, and added that “I put this country back on its feet”.

The American President blamed his staff when asked if he took responsibility of having classified documents in his home. He said he didn’t know they had put sensitive memos in his home garage. The special counsel said they found the documents next to a dog bed.

BBC said that the situation was tense at White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room as Biden pushed back at the reporters. When one journalist said that Americans are concerned about his age, Joe Biden raised his voice and replied, “that is your judgement, that is your judgement”. He insisted that his memory is “fine” and “has not gotten worse” during his presidency tenure.

Biden’s legal team also criticised the special counsel’s remark about Mr Biden’s alleged memory lapses. White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a letter attached to the report that, “the report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events”.

The report came after a separate investigation charged former President Donald Trump with mishandling classified documents after his departure from the White House. The Hur report differentiate between Biden and Trump cases and stated that, while Biden handed over the documents to government archivists, Trump “allegedly did the opposite”.